What’s At Stake At Next Week’s Bangkok Climate Summit
A climate change summit is taking place March 31st-April 4 in Bangkok. Representatives of over 170 countries are meeting to get a draft accord in place for a successor to the Kyoto Protocol which expires in 2012. The deadline to reach a new protocol has been set for a December 2009 meeting in Denmark.
An interim summit held in Japan mid March convened representatives of the world’s top 20 greenhouse gas emitting countries responsible for 80% of the world’s pollution. It appeared that little progress was made. But all countries including the US agreed in Bali that they’d participate in the negotiations to the Kyoto’s successor and that promise was upheld two weeks ago. What was termed a “principle of common but differentiated responsibility” was accepted as a framework for negotiations. In other words, the new pact will bind all countries to various actions.
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The Bangkok meeting aims to eke out a work program for the next year and a half.
These are the opinions of the main countries involved:
-China: developed countries should live up to a guideline they agreed on in Bali; 2020 cuts of 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels.
-Developing countries: insist they should be subject to less stringent targets as G8 countries. Are very skeptical towards Japan’s proposal to tackle the problems industry by industry.
-United States: agreed to take part in the successor to the Kyoto Protocol which it bailed out of. Two environmental advisors to President Bush, James Connaughton and Daniel Price told a recent press conference in Paris that the US is “prepared to enter into binding international obligations to reduce greenhouse gases as part of a global agreement in which all major economies similarly undertake binding international obligations.”
-European Union: Broad binding targets for each nation. In Bali, European negotiators were pushing for a binding target to cut rich nation emissions by between 25 to 40 percent by 2020 compared with their 1990 levels, but American negotiators pressurized them not to include numbers.
-Japan: lobbies for a sector-based, rather than a country-based approach. Setting energy efficiency goals for each industry.
-South Africa: is strongly against the Japanese industry based approach and voiced this during the last Japanese meeting.
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