Tiempo Climate Newswatch

British Prime Minister Tony Blair appeared to downplay chances of targets-based, Kyoto-style agreement post 2012, speaking at a G8 meeting of energy and environment ministers in London, United Kingdom, on climate change last week. "The blunt truth about the politics of climate change is that no country will want to sacrifice its economy in order to meet this challenge," he warned. "But all economies know that the only sensible, long-term way to develop is to do it on a sustainable basis." "People fear some external force is going to impose some internal target on you which is going to restrict your economic growth," he continued. "I think in the world after 2012 we need to find a better, more sensitive set of mechanisms to deal with this problem."

Opposition politicians and environmentalists expressed serious concern at what appeared to be a marked shift in policy. Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth called for clarification: "We need to understand what this means. It's seismic in climate change politics and threatens 15 years' worth of negotiations." Liberal Democrat environment spokesman Norman Baker said: "It is all very well for the government to trumpet the merits of technology in reducing carbon emissions, but it simply isn't enough; we need robust, measurable targets, not just vague aspirations." Environment Secretary Margaret Beckett warned that Blair's comments had been "grossly over-interpreted."

More information

• BBC
• Guardian Unlimited

• Terra Daily
• Guardian Unlimited

African ministers, banking officials and development partners met in Nairobi, Kenya, October 26th to discuss how funds resulting from debt cancellation could be used to protect the environment. The poorer countries could save US$1.5 billion in debt repayments each year. "Targeted investments in 'natural capital' such as forests, water and land can be cost effective in helping countries meet internationally agreed goals," such as Millennium Development Goals, argued Klaus Toepfer, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

The G8 decision made in Gleneagles, Scotland, earlier this year would cancel US$40 billion of debt owed by poor countries to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the African Development Bank. UNEP has proposed a number of ways in which environmental protection could support socio-economic development, for example, with clean water supplies increasing school attendance, malaria rates reduced by declining deforestation and improvements in agriculture as a result of slowing land degradation.

More information

• UN News Centre

• The Guardian

Urgent action is needed to protect the world's coral reefs, warns the World Conservation Union (IUCN) in a new report. "Twenty per cent of the Earth’s coral reefs, arguably the richest of all marine ecosystems, have been effectively destroyed today," reports Carl Gustaf Lundin of IUCN's Global Marine Programme. "Another 30 per cent will become seriously depleted if no action is taken within the next 20-40 years, with climate change being a major factor for their loss." Higher sea temperatures stress the reef system and cause coral bleaching, as the tiny plants that colour the white coral skeleton are ejected, and, if persistent, this process can result in the death of the coral.

The report, Coral Reef Resilience and Resistance to Bleaching, concludes that marine protected areas are key to ensuring the survival of these "underwater rainforests". "For a global marine protected areas network, we need to take climate change into consideration. Some marine ecosystems become more valuable, others less so, which influences our decisions on which site should be included in the global network," argues Lundin.

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Background

• ENS
• Coral Reef Resilience and Resistance to Bleaching, (1.9Mb download), IUCN

• On the Web: Coral reefs