Tiempo Climate Newswatch

This year's second round of the Bonn United Nations Climate Change Talks is intended to pick up on issues that were not resolved at the Copenhagen Climate Summit and pave the way for full implementation of climate change action across the globe. "The Copenhagen meeting may have postponed an outcome for at least a year, but it did not postpone the impacts of climate change, said Yvo de Boer, outgoing executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change secretariat. "The deadline to agree an effective international response to climate change at Copenhagen was set because governments, when launching negotiations in Bali in 2007, recognized the scientific warning on climate for what it was: a siren call to act now, or face the worst," he continued.

A new negotiating text under the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention will be considered. "Climate negotiations over the next two weeks will be on track if they keep focused on a common way forward towards a concrete and realistic goal in Cancún. There is a growing consensus on what that the goal for Cancún can be - namely, a full, operational architecture to implement effective, collective climate action," de Boer commented. The Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol will be discussing the future of the Protocol beyond 2012. de Boer called on governments "to develop greater clarity on the future of the Kyoto Protocol, since this issue cannot be left unattended until Cancún." He expects progress to be made in key areas such as forests, finance for developing countries and cuts in emissions. "Cancún can deliver if promises of help are kept and if promises to compromise are honoured in the negotiations," he said, calling for more concrete contributions to the adaptation fund from other countries in the run-up to Cancún, "to deliver on what they promised five months ago."

Bolivia's ambassador Pablo Solón has expressed concern over the current United Nations climate negotiations, saying that the voices of the real victims of climate change are being excluded from the negotiations. "In April 2010 more than 35,000 people from 140 countries gathered in Cochabamba, Bolivia and developed the historic Cochabamba People's Agreement a consensus-based document reflecting substantive solutions to the climate crisis." he said. "We are, therefore, deeply concerned that the new text proposed as a basis for climate change negotiations does not reflect any of the main conclusions reached in Cochabamba," he continued.

Solón criticized the level of financial assistance that has been proposed: "On finance we are only considering US$100 billion a year to respond to climate change - just US$20 per person in the developing world - to solve climate change. It's clear that climate change impacts are not going to be dealt with for just US$20 per person." He urged the United Nations to embrace the conclusions reached by social movements, indigenous peoples and international civil society in Cochabamba. "It is both undemocratic and non-transparent to exclude particular proposals from the negotiations, and it is imperative that the United Nations listens to the global community on this issue critical to humanity," he said.

A more accurate method of calculating the change in greenhouse gas emissions due to land-use change has been developed by researchers in the United States. Existing methods of estimating the greenhouse gas value of an ecosystem such as a forest may only consider the amount of carbon stored in the trees. "What some analyses miss is the potential for that forest to take up more carbon in the future," said author Evan DeLucia from the Energy Biosciences Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "And they're missing the greenhouse gas costs - the added emissions that result from intensively managing the land - that are associated with that new cropland."

The new method takes account a wider range of factors that influence the emissions associated with land-use change, such as an ecosystem's ability to take up or release greenhouse gases over time and its vulnerability to natural disturbances, such as fire or hurricane damage, according to co-author Kristina Anderson-Teixeira at the Energy Biosciences Institute. "To understand the place of nature these days, we've got to put a value on it," DeLucia said. "It's got to compete with all the other values that we put out there. This is by far the most comprehensive way to value an ecosystem in the context of greenhouse gases."