Cement, Energy & Environment

Environment Protection & Resource Management ADMITTING TO 20 YEARS OF MIXED RESULTS DOHA AGREES TO FRESH GAS Er '"""'''"'"' r11Tc The two-week long UN climate talks came to a close in Doha on 8.12.2012 with delegates of 194 countries endorsing another set of greenhouse gas emission cuts between 2013 and 2020. Despite a near total absence of increased effort from industrialized countries to reduce emissions and paucity of funds to help developing nations limit climate change, the Doha talks made an important shift by recognizing that 20 years of effort to limit emissions did not deliver the desired result. The outcome of "Doha Climate Gateway" came 24 hours after the negotiations were supposed to close on Friday evening. The delay was on account of countries like Poland, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus demanding use of the extra credit or assigned units commonly known as "hotair", which had been given to them in the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol to deal with the breakdown of their industrial structure after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Poland, which will host the next round of talks, held up the process by refusing to sign on the second phase of the Protocol until the issue of hot air was resolved to its satisfaction. "Doha has opened up a new gateway to bigger ambition and to greater action-the Doha Climate Gateway,· conference president Abdullah bin Hamad Al-Attiyah of Qatar. "Qatar is proud to have been able to bring governments here to achieve this historic task. Now governments must move quickly through the Doha Climate Gateway to push forward with the solutions to climate change: United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change executive secretary Christiana Figueres acknowledged that much more needs to be done to ensure that the rise in global temperature is limited two degrees so as to avoid a situation where extreme weather events become the new normal. "Now; there is much work to do. Doha is another step in the right direction, but we still have a long road ahead," she said. "The door to stay below two degrees remains barely open. The science shows it, the data proves it. The UN climate change negotiations must now focus on the concrete ways and means to accelerate action and ambition. Figueres said the world has the money and technology to keep global warming below two degrees. "After Doha, it is a matter of scale, speed, determination and sticking to the timetable," she said. In Doha, representatives of nearly 200 countries brought to a close the five-year long negotiations on the Bali Roadmap. Agreed to in 2007, the pillars of the Bali road map addressed emission reduction by industrialized countries that were not part of the Kyoto Protocol-United States; voluntary efforts to limit emissions by developing countries; adaptation to the impacts of climate change; finance and technology for developing countries, and capacity building. All outstanding issues will now be addressed as part of the new regime or by the permanent technical bodies of the convention. The Kyoto Protocol, the only legally binding agreement to combat climate change, requires industrialized countries to take quantified emission reduction targets. Only Europe and Australia, accounting for 15 per cent of global emissions, agreed to sign on for the second and final phase. Last year, Canada withdrew from the Protocol, while Russia, New Zealand and Japan said they would not sign on for the second phase. The 1997 iconic agreement will run until 2020. Together with the negotiations of the Bali Roadmap, the Kyoto Protocol formed the two-track global approach to limit climate change. By bringing the existing two-track negotiations to a close countries signaled that they were moving on to work on designing the new global climate regime they had agreed to in Durban in 2011 . Analysts and delegates had described the Doha talks as a "housekeeping conference of parties" and a •transitional COP" as it was meant to close down existing negotiations to move to work on the new regime. This meant that expectations from the Doha round were not very high. Nonetheless, there was a sense of disappointment from the final outcome. "This is not perfect but it is a modest step in the right direction," said EU Commissioner for climate change Connie Hedegaard. Courtesy: The Economic Times Doha, 07.12.2012. 15