“I certainly think that a legally-binding agreement is achievable, but that is not what governments are moving toward in Durban," she told Environmental Finance, referring to this year's Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UNFCCC in South Africa, which runs from 28 November until 9 December.
Instead, Figueres said, governments will be looking at the possibility of a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol - the first expires at the end of 2012 -as well as elaborating on new emissions reduction targets made under the auspices of the UNFCCC. Then, she said, they could look at “how they would start a process toward a comprehensive agreement that they would work on over the next years".
This process would build “on the institutional infrastructure that they are putting in place", Figueres said. “It's a very different approach to what they've had in the past, because they are actually using the fact that they will have an institution in place for finance, one for technology deployment, one to give coherence on adaptation, they will have guidelines with respect to [monitoring, reporting and verifying emissions]," she said. Read the full report here.
Source: Katie Kouchakji, Environmental Finance.
