Cancun Climate Summit reaches deal but opinions divided about its effectiveness
Mon 13 December 2010
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The UK Government welcomed the climate change agreement reached at the Cancun Summit which achieved a consensus on the way forward on a range of issues. Opinions were mixed, however, about the effectiveness of the agreements.
According to the UK Department for Energy and Climate Change, the key outcomes from the agreements at the Summit are:
Objective: agreement to peak emissions and an overall 2 degree target to limit temperature rise.
Long-term finance: established the Green Climate Fund and will start to get it ready to help developing countries go low carbon and adapt to climate impacts.
Deforestation: agreed to slow, halt and reverse destruction of trees and agree the rules for delivering it and for monitoring progress.
Technology/Adaptation: set up the mechanisms to help developing countries access low carbon technology, and adapt to climate change
Emissions: bringing details of what developed and developing countries are doing to tackle climate change, promised in Copenhagen, into the UN system so they can be assessed.
MRV: agreed a system so we know how countries are living up to their promises to take action on emissions.
The Prime Minister David Cameron said: "The Cancun agreement is a very significant step forward in renewing the determination of the international community to tackle climate change through multilateral action. Now the world must deliver on its promises.”
Connie Hedegaard, the European Commissioner for Climate Action said the Summit outcome represents "real progress". She said that the EU had achieved its aims. "The EU came to Cancún in the hope that we would have a substantial package, a package showing progress and substance, as well as paving the way forward in this process, and that we got in the Cancún agreement. That is progress."
However, she added: "It is real progress, but it is also fair to say that we have a long and challenging journey ahead of us."
All sides are aiming for a final climate deal at the next big United Nations climate conference in South Africa at the end of 2011.
Negotiators went to Cancún for the two-week climate summit with modest expectations compared to the high hopes that were dashed in Copenhagen last year. But
The UK's environment minister, Chris Huhne, said that the outcome makes it more likely that the EU will increase its emissions reduction pledge to 30% by 2020, up from the current pledge of 20%. "I think it definitely makes an agreement on 30% in the EU more likely," he said (quoted by European Voice). "We were making lots of progress on that anyway. I think we'll have some other big member states stating that they're prepared to back this move to 30%."
Gordon Shepherd, head of the global climate initiative at WWF said in a statement that countries were leaving Cancún with "a renewed sense of goodwill and some sense of purpose.
Jess Miller of Greenpeace wrote in a blog posting from Cancún that "the talks have not delivered a global climate deal but have placed the building blocks for that strong deal to be created".
Jack Short, Secretary General of the International Transport Forum, the transport think-tank at the OECD in Paris, said that he does not think that the agreement reached in Cancún will increase pressure on the transport sector to reduce its CO2 emissions.
“The Cancun Agreements decided at COP 16 may have given new impetus to a stalled UN negotiating process but will have no direct impact on continued global growth of transport CO2 emissions,” Short said.
“Despite conciliatory moves in the final hours of the conference, it now seems less likely that countries will be able to agree an extension of the Kyoto Protocol or an alternative, wider-ranging international treaty on Greenhouse Gas emissions reductions by 2012.”
“This means that political pressure to reduce emissions in the transport sector will probably not increase over the next few years. In some cases it may indeed wane. In practice, carbon constraints will likely not become a defining factor for transport policy for several more years.”
Short adds that: “current emission trajectories and the uncertain prospect for real emission reduction efforts after the Kyoto Treaty expires also highlight the heightened risk to transport infrastructure and networks from climate disruption.”
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