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Friday, April 8, 2011

Bangkok Talks Close With Agenda for 2011, but Rich-Poor Divide Remains

by Eric J. Lyman

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 The year's first set of U.N. climate change negotiations concluded Friday in Bangkok with an agreement on a broad set of priorities for the rest of the year, but the talks failed to do much to heal the rift between rich and poor countries that had stalled negotiations for two of the six days of talks.

While the agenda was finalized, it was not an official “work plan”--jargon for an enforceable set of priorities that would implement the big picture agreements that emerged from last year’s Conference of the Parties summit in Cancun. That step in the process will betaken up again at the next set of meetings, in June in Bonn, Germany.

The agenda agreed to in Bangkok seeks to address the fate of the Kyoto Protocol once the 2008-2012 compliance period expires, clarifying sources for adaptation funding set to total $100 billion per year by 2020, an agreement on verification methods for greenhouse gas emissions from countries with binding targets going forward, and the development of a consensus on the so-called “level of ambition” starting in 2013--terminology that refers to how deep greenhouse gas emissions cuts should be and how large a group of countries will be required to make them.

The talks, which drew 2,000 participants from 175 countries, failed to bridge divisions between rich and poor countries. The talks were stalled on an array of procedural issues as developing countries, including members of the Group of 77 and the Africa Group, attempted to bog down the meetings in protest of what, according to Kenyan delegate Grace Morgan said was “an unwillingness of rich countries to address their responsibilities.” They threatened to do it again during future negotiations if their views were not taken into consideration.

Despite the shortcomings of the Bangkok talks, Christiana Figueres, the head of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, gave a positive spin to the results from the first major climate change negotiations of 2011.

“Discussions in Bangkok … included not only a focus on what should happen with regard to the future of the Kyoto Protocol but also how it should happen,” she said in a briefing. “It is significant that there is a strong desire to build on the Kyoto rules and a desire to find a political solution in 2011.”
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