Tiempo Climate Newswatch

The BASIC nations, Brazil, South Africa, India and China, will submit plans for voluntary mitigation actions by the end of January deadline under the Copenhagen Accord, but they have noted that the agreement has no legal basis. "We support the Copenhagen Accord. But all of us were unanimously of the view that its value lies not as a stand-alone document but as an input into the two-track negotiation process [on the future of the Kyoto Protocol and on long-term cooperative action] under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)," said India’s minister for environment and forests Jairam Ramesh. The BASIC nations called for at least five negotiating sessions before the next annual UNFCCC summit in Mexico at the end of the year.

"BASIC will take the lead in large-scale emission reduction and also stick to the policy of common but differentiated principle," said Buyelwa Sonjica, South African minister for water and environmental affairs. She emphasized that BASIC would not make any decision outside the Group of 77 (G-77) countries. "We see ourselves as adding value to the proposals of G-77," she added. The BASIC nations committed to developing a framework for permanent scientific cooperation and extending technological support to other developing nations, especially least developed countries (LDCs), in areas such as forestry and adaptation. Resolving to help the most vulnerable nations was a "slap in the face of rich countries that are in a better position to do so", commented Carlos Minc, Brazil's environment minister. Minc estimated total support to LDCs would top the US$10 billion pledged by the rich.

While there have been some partial or regional successes, the world has "failed to fulfill the target adopted by the 110 heads of state to substantially reduce the rate of loss of biodiversity by 2010," warned Ahmed Djoghlaf, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, at a high-level meeting in Paris to launch the International Year of Biodiversity. "We have forgotten nature is the source of life on our planet, that nature provides the basic infrastructure for all economic activity and for our cultures," said Julia Marton-Lefèvre, head of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Thirty per cent of all species are threatened - including 22 per cent of all mammals who are our biological cousins. "Imagine if 30 per cent of your friends faced extinction and that risk was increasing," Marton-Lefèvre said.

Funding is a critical issue. "There is never enough funding, never enough political will, especially in the wealthy countries. So what can we do?" asked Henri Djombo, minister of sustainable development, forestry economy and environment for the Republic of Congo. "Our wealth and well-being is being undermined by not acting," he warned. According to Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, chairperson of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, we need to diagnose the real causes of the extinction crisis - the current economic system." Market mechanisms don't integrate ecology, culture, fairness and equity, she said.

Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman, has warned that climate research could take funds away from global health, placing hundreds and thousands of lives at risk. Writing in the Annual Letter from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he warns that "if just one per cent of the $100 billion goal [pledged in the Copenhagen Accord] came from vaccine funding, then 700,000 more children could die from preventable diseases."

Gates argues that the most important innovation required to avoid climate change will be a way of producing electricity that is cheaper than coal and that emits no greenhouse gases. Governments, he says, should supply large amounts of funding for research and development. But as the energy and climate market is huge and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation invests in areas where there is not a big market, "a way that we can play a unique role here" has yet to emerge. Gates considers that, in the long run, "not spending on health is a bad deal for the environment because improvements in health, including voluntary family planning, lead people to have smaller families, which in turn reduces the strain on the environment."