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Thursday, December 8, 2011

U.S. Negotiator Calls for Strong, Credible Outcome to Durban Talks

by Dean Scott

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 DURBAN, South Africa—With climate talks here headed toward their final day, the top U.S. negotiator Thursday urged other high-level delegates to “secure a strong and credible outcome that builds on” climate finance and other agreements reached at last year’s summit in Cancun.

The content of the speech by U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern to the high-level plenary got perhaps less attention than in past years, in part because his comments at a press conference afterward overshadowed his formal speech.

At the press conference, Stern chastised reporters, and even some ministers, for what he said is a mischaracterization of the United States as obstructing efforts to get a legally binding global climate deal by 2020.

In his plenary speech, however, Stern took a hopeful stance on the prospect of getting progress out of the South Africa climate talks. He highlighted efforts to build on the 2010 agreements reached in Cancun, Mexico, that launched a Green Climate Fund and a Clean Technology Center to help transfer low-carbon technologies to developing nations.

The deals struck by negotiators in Mexico also provided a foundation for broad forest protection, an Adaptation Committee to help countries address rising sea levels and other effects of climate change, and measures for developing countries to report their greenhouse gas emissions and to have their actions verified.

Those provisions have long been sought by the United States, which has said that strong requirements to measure, report, and verify developing nations' actions are crucial to any global climate deal.

Stern, who has pointed to the progress in Cancun as central to future world action on climate change—particularly given the challenges of getting a legally binding climate agreement in place—returned repeatedly to those accomplishments in his speech on the next-to-last day of the Nov. 28-Dec. 9 talks here.

"The Cancun Agreements “should guide international climate action for a long time to come,” he said, adding that a critical part of the negotiations going on in Durban “is to do the work necessary to start bringing these new arrangements to life.”

Any final deal reached at the South Africa climate negotiations, which are being held under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, must be a “balanced package” that makes further progress on the Cancun Agreements, Stern said.

“That is the only basis on which we can move forward,” he said.

In his speech, Stern also said the United States is “making progress” toward President Obama’s pledge, offered in the run-up to the 2009 Copenhagen climate talks, to cut its greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels.

But Stern acknowledged to reporters earlier this week that the administration has yet to do a thorough accounting of how it can reach that target given the collapse of a 2009 cap-and-trade bill that included emissions caps.
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