Cement Energy and Environment

~ . Conclusion In April 2011, in Bangkok, governments had resolved the political issues around their objectives for this year, and in June 2011 in Bonn , they would need to get down to achieving concrete progress. Meanwhile, work on designing new climate institutions had begun and needed to be completed for this year's United Nations Climate Conference, to be held in Durban , South Africa, in December. The governments have two major tasks before Durban; i) The first being to agree on ways to strengthen the international conditions that would allow nations to work together in making deeper global emission cuts. That would entail confronting the open political question over the future of the Kyoto Protocol itself - the only agreement to date that captured binding commitments by industri alized countri es. ii) The second task was designing the new climate institutions that would provide adequate and efficient support to developing countries. They included the Green Climate Fund, the Technology Mechanism and establishing the Adaptation Committee. In the wider world outside the negotiations, there were two encou raging trends: i) First, countries, including the biggest economies, were moving forward with new policies to promote low carbon growth, even if they did not always have a climate label attached to those policies. ii) Secondly, the private sector continued to increase its investment in low-carbon businesses and renewable energy, and they wanted to do more. In Durban, therefore, Governments would need to take further steps to drive both of those very important trends forward , and faster. However, Todd Stern, the United States Government's lead to envoy on climate change, has cautioned that United Nations talks to negotiate a binding treaty were based on "unrealistic" expectations that were "not doable". Whether Agreement at Durban will be doable or not will be decided only at Durban. Courtesy: CPS/ Journal, Vol.3 No.5, July 2011, Pp17-22. GOVERNMENT OF CANADA COMMITMENTS REDUCTION IN GHG EMISSIONS FROM 2006 LEVELS 20% BY 2020 (1 7% - Officially announced in Jan 2010) 60-70% By 2050 Courtesy: CPS/ Journal, Vo/.3 No.5, July 2011, P15. NEW ANSWERS 0 Cl1MATE PROBLE~1- The new paradigm must consider differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities Mukul Sanwal The strategic issue for the next round of climate negotiations, at Durbun, is the question of equity. There is, as yet, no consensus whether political decisions on equitably sharing the global commons - the new paradigm-are a precondition for agreement on a global rule-based system, or incremental steps to develop a rul e-based system on the basis of the Cancun Agreements- the old paradigm-well equitable outcomes. lead to Recent scientific consensus Challenges current perspectives on future emissions as well as the nature of international consultative process conducted by the International Council for Science and the International Social Science Council, the social and bio-physical sub– systems are interwined such that the system's conditions and responses to external forcing are based on the synergy of the two sub-systems. Consequently, the fu ll global system has to be studied rather than on ly its components, as none of the challenges can be fully addressed without addressing the other challenges. For example, a recent review of China's actions to reduce energy and carbon intensity refutes the many analyses projecting continued exponential growth for China as energy demand will plateau around 2030-40 because of saturation effects - appliances, residential and commercial floor area , roadways, railways, fertilizer use, etc-deceleration of unbanisation, low population growth and change in export mix to high value-added products, C0 2 emissions will stabilize 31