Earth Equity News

Future of U.N.’s Role in Combating Climate Change at Stake in Cancun. By Adam Morton and Tom Arup, Sydney Herald, 11/27/10. “Politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists and activists have begun rolling in [to Cancun] for the first major U.N. meeting on climate change since the disastrous close last December to the Copenhagen conference. At stake, insiders say, is nothing less than the future of the UN's role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and addressing the climate change that scientists warn is already locked in. Eighteen years after their birth at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, the UN climate negotiations that yielded the 1997 Kyoto Protocol are in need of redemption, in the form of methodical progress towards a treaty that can be completed within the next two years.

''‘The order of the day is pragmatism,’ said a UN assistant secretary-general, Robert Orr, this week of the Cancun meeting, suggesting negotiators should ‘make progress where we can on the issues we can.’ With the US and China at odds on key points, those issues are expected to include reducing emissions from destroying tropical rainforests, providing financial help to the world's most vulnerable countries and sharing clean energy technology with developing nations. Bigger stumbling blocks -- locking in emissions targets, China consenting to international verification of its emissions, and the legal design of a new climate treaty to start in 2013 -- are likely to have to wait. The most significant question going into the meeting is: can the talks rebuild the trust shattered at Copenhagen and lay a foundation for a climate pact to be signed next year in Durban, South Africa or, more likely, in Rio de Janeiro in December 2012?”