Tiempo Climate Newswatch

A summit commitment by Chinese president Hu Jintao to slow his nation's rate of emissions growth was widely applauded. "It’s striking that China has come to New York with some real proposals while President Obama’s speech was largely rhetorical," said Jennifer Haverkamp of the Environmental Defense Fund in the United States. "The key question is whether these steps will undermine the position of those in Congress who are using concern about China’s lack of action as a reason not to move forward," she continued. Hu announced that China would reduce carbon intensity by a "notable margin" from 2005 levels by the year 2020. "The world expects us to make a decision in the face of climate change, an issue which bears on mankind’s survival and development," he said.

United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon was pleased with the tone of the meeting. "Today's summit signals a determination of world leaders to address this challenge and reach a substantive deal in Copenhagen," he said. Others were more cautious. "We heard a lot of urgency in the words of the world leaders who spoke in the opening session," said David Waskow from Oxfam International. "What remains to be seen is whether they will be able to translate their language into a fair, ambitious and binding global treaty," he continued. Frank Jotzo, deputy director of the Australian National University's Climate Change Institute in Canberra, commented that "the greatest difficulty for Copenhagen right now is United States domestic politics. It may take until well into 2010 for the United States to be able to make an international commitment that is credibly backed by domestic policy."

In the run-up to the United Nations Summit on Climate Change, the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) issued a declaration calling for global temperature to be limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, saying that the international community should ensure that global greenhouse gas emissions peak by 2015 and fall to 85 per cent below 1990 levels by the year 2050. "Now is the time for action," said Tilman Thomas, prime minister of Grenada and AOSIS chair. "There is no more time left for inaction as our survival depends on 1.5 [degrees Celsius] to stay alive."

Following the United Nations summit, leaders of the Group of 20 (G-20) nations, meeting in Pittsburgh in the United States, agreed to phase out almost US$300 billion in fossil-fuel subsidies in the "medium term." They delayed, however, a decision on how to assist financially poor nations tackle climate change. Finance ministers will report in November on "a range of possible options for climate-change financing." "This is a crisis of leadership. The rich-country G-20 leaders - especially Merkel and Obama - set themselves a deadline for a climate finance proposal, and then slept right through it," said Ben Wikler of Avaaz. "Until the United States, the European Union and Japanese leaders wake up and put together a serious climate finance plan, there will be a 150 billion dollar pothole on the road to Copenhagen," he warned. Jake Schmidt at the Natural Resources Defense Council in the United States said that the move to end fossil-fuel subsidies, while useful, should not be considered a "replacement for the needed public-sector investment to mobilize clean-energy investment in developing countries."

Most of the world's deltas are sinking, threatening the half a billion inhabitants of these regions, according to a new assessment based on satellite data and historical records. A range of human activities are responsible. "This study shows there are a host of human-induced factors that already cause deltas to sink much more rapidly than could be explained by sea level [rise] alone," said study contributor Albert Kettner from the University of Colorado at Boulder in the United States.

The Chao Praya River, flowing through Bangkok, Thailand, has been sinking at a rate of 13-150 mm a year in recent times. Sediment deposition has been drastically reduced as the river has been dammed and diverted and water extracted for irrigation. The Po Delta, in northern Italy sunk by 3.7m over the 20th century as a result of methane extraction. The assessment concludes that global delta flooding could increase by 50 per cent if sea level rises by around 0.5m by the end of the century. "Although humans have largely mastered the everyday behaviour of lowland rivers, they seem less able to deal with the fury of storm surges that can temporarily raise sea level by three to 10 metres," wrote the study's authors write. "It remains alarming how often deltas flood, whether from land or from sea, and the trend seems to be worsening."