Despite fleeting optimism following last December's annual UN climate summit in Cancun, the 190-nation UN climate change convention (UNFCCC) appears a long way from any new comprehensive treaty binding all the world's big emitters to cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, while extension of the existing Kyoto Protocol binding industrialised nations to a second commitment period of emission targets beyond 2012 is in grave doubt.
The Bonn session was the second this year since Cancun where it appeared some progress had been made towards a new global climate agreement including all the big emitters, with the Copenhagen accord of the previous year finally adopted by the convention. But since then at intervening negotiating sessions in Bangkok and now Bonn progress has very much stalled.
The UN-led, top-down process to secure a global effort against climate change is breaking down and is being replaced by a bottom-up approach where nations determine their own actions unilaterally without being bound by international treaty, Antony Hobley, global head of climate change and carbon finance and law firm Norton Rose, told a briefing in Sydney last week.
Developing nations led by China are demanding that developed nations commit to extend Kyoto. But Canada, Japan and Russia have stiffened their refusal to do so because the US and big developing-world emitters aren't part of Kyoto. Europe is the only group of rich nations now willing to sign up to a ‘Kyoto 2' but its negotiators said last week it would not do so alone. Read the full report here.
Source: Carbon Positive.net.
