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Monday, April 4, 2011

U.N. Climate Talks Get Underway in Bangkok, Amid Calls for Action, Protests

by Eric J. Lyman

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 The latest round of United Nations climate change talks began Sunday in Bangkok amid both protests that rich countries were doing too little to satisfy their responsibility for past greenhouse gas emissions and calls from the U.N.’s top climate change official to build on the progress made at December’s climate change summit in Mexico.

The Bangkok talks, which run through Friday, are the first of at least three sets of negotiations that will set the stage for the 17th Conference of the Parties in Durban, South Africa at the end of the year.

The previous conference of the parties, in Cancun, concluded with a dramatic final day of talks that yielded agreements in six key areas and was hailed by UN officials as a momentum-building deal. But Sunday in Bangkok, Christiana Figueres, the executive director of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, said that without significant progress in Bangkok and at the subsequent meetings leading up to Durban, the progress from Cancun would be lost.

“Here in Bangkok, governments have the early opportunity to push ahead to complete the work from Cancun,” she said. “If governments move forward in the continued spirit of flexibility and compromise that inspired them in Mexico, then I believe they can make significant new progress in 2011.”

Unlike most U.N. climate change talks, the Bangkok meetings got underway without a specific set of goals to be met. Instead, the meetings are designed to set the table for the mid-year meeting of the Subsidiary Bodies near UNFCCC headquarters in Bonn. But delegates said Monday that discussions were already talking place in a few key areas, such as forestry management and funding sources for adaptation initiatives. But they said the main outcome of the six days of talks will be the creation of a roadmap that will establish goals and priorities for the rest of the year—“operationalizing” the Cancun agreements, to use UN-speak.

“What happened in Cancun was that a scenario for success was established,” Artur Runge-Metzger, a European Commission delegate in Bangkok told BNA in a brief telephone interview. “If Bangkok does what it should do it should raise the level of ambition and create a kind of roadmap on how to achieve that over the coming months.”

The talks got underway amid protests outside the U.N. building in the Thai capital, with nearly 200 activists--a large number for a non-COP meeting--reportedly gathered to call on rich countries to take a larger share of the costs associated to adapt to the impacts of climate change and to reduce future emissions by setting more ambitious mitigation targets. The protests briefly blocked access to the conference facility.
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