The 14th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) took place in Poznan, Poland, in early December. The hope was that the meeting would lay the groundwork for a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. Plenty of hurdles to that goal remain, but Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, remained upbeat during a press announcement.

While the official reports claim that there is "a clear commitment from governments to shift into full negotiating mode next year in order to shape an ambitious and effective international response to climate change," there are still differences between developed and developing countries that need to be worked out.
 
Progress was made in the area of technology with the endorsement of the Global Environment Facility’s "Poznan Strategic Programme on Technology Transfer."  The aim of this programme is to scale up the level of investment by levering private investments that developing countries require both for mitigation and adaptation technologies.
 
"We will now move to the next level of negotiations, which involves crafting a concrete negotiating text for the agreed outcome," said the President of the conference, Polish Minister of the Environment Maciej Nowicki. Parties agreed that a first draft of the text would be available at a UNFCCC gathering in Bonn in June 2009.
 
"In addition to having agreed the work programme for next year, we have cleared the decks of many technical issues," President Nowicki said. "Poznań is the place where the partnership between the developing and developed world to fight climate change has shifted beyond rhetoric and turned into real action," he said.
 
In that spirit, at Poznan, the finishing touches were put to the Kyoto Protocol’s adaptation fund, thereby enabling the fund to receive projects in the course of 2009. Parties agreed that the fund (CDM), fed by a share of proceeds from the Kyoto protocol’s clean development mechanism and voluntary contributions, would have a legal capacity granting developing countries direct access.

However, Parties were unable to reach consensus on scaling up funding for adaptation by agreeing to put a levy on the other two Kyoto mechanisms, Joint Implementation and Emissions Trading.
 
Together with decisions aimed at streamlining and speeding up the CDM, parties asked the CDM Executive Board to explore procedures and methodologies that would enhance regional and sub-regional distribution of projects. Parties also asked the Board to assess the implications of including carbon capture and storage projects and extending the eligibility criteria for afforestation and reforestation projects.   
 
A key event at the conference was a ministerial round table on a shared vision for long-term cooperative action on climate change. "Governments have sent a strong political signal that despite the financial and economic crisis, significant funds can be mobilized for both mitigation and adaptation in developing countries with the help of a clever financial architecture and the institutions to deliver the financial support," said Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
 
"We now have a much clearer sense of where we need to go in designing an outcome which will spell out the commitments of developed countries, the financial support required and the institutions that will deliver that support as part of the Copenhagen outcome," he added.
 
Countries meeting in Poznan made progress on a number of issues that are important in the short run - up to 2012 - particularly for developing countries, including adaptation, finance, technology and reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. 
 
In addition, the conference discussed in detail the issue of disaster management, risk assessment and insurance, essential to help developing countries cope with the inevitable effects of climate change. 
 
Governments meeting under the Kyoto Protocol agreed that commitments of industrialized countries post-2012 should principally take the form of quantified emission limitation and reduction objectives, in line with the type of emission reduction targets they have assumed for the first commitment period of the protocol. 
 
Other interesting announcements included the following:

• Australia agreed to reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by five or 15 per cent by 2020 from 2000 levels, depending on whether an international agreement is finalized next year with targets for countries such as China and India.
• The United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged developing countries to adopt GHG reduction goals. He also insisted that economic assistance for this has to come from developed nations for this to succeed.

Again, much depends on a global commitment to climate change action.

 

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