Tiempo Climate Newswatch

Saudi Arabia blocked a call at the Bonn Climate Change Talks by the Association of Small Island States for a study into the impact of 1.5 degrees Celsius global warming. "Some small island states could become stateless from sea level rise, which is why they are calling for global temperature rise to be kept below 1.5°C," commented Wendel Trio of Greenpeace. "That Saudi Arabia, a country with such obvious oil interests, exploited the United Nations consensus rule to stop the world's most vulnerable countries from getting a much-needed summary of the latest climate science is breathtaking for its criminal disregard for the human impacts of climate change," he continued.

As the talks ended, Yvo de Boer, outgoing executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) secretariat, noted that there has been a "positive spirit" at the talks, with "good progress" over technical issues. Nevertheless, "a number of hot political issues are very much stuck and need to be addressed," he added. In his farewell statement, he accused governments of doing too little on climate change. "To move towards World Cup imagery: we got a yellow card in Copenhagen and the referee's hand will edge towards the red one if we fail to deliver in Cancún and beyond," he said. His expectation of the Cancún summit later this year is that it can provide an agreed architecture to deliver on adaptation, mitigation, technology, finance, capacity-building and reducing deforestation in developing countries. de Boer was given a standing ovation by the delegates following his address. Christiana Figueres takes over as executive secretary of the UNFCCC Secretariat.

A survey of trends in the size of a sample of Pacific islands has shown that most have not lost area as sea level has risen over the past 60 years. Just four islands out of the 27 studied have diminished in size since the 1950s. "It has been thought that as the sea level goes up, islands will sit there and drown," commented co-author Paul Kench of the University of Auckland in New Zealand. "But they won't. The sea level will go up and the island will start responding."

"Atolls are composed of once-living material," said co-author Arthur Webb at the South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission in Fiji, "so you have a continual growth." Debris from coral reefs around the islands provides a constant supply of material that can preserve an island's size, though changes may occur on the coastal configuration. Kench and Webb warn, though, that accelerated sea-level rise may overwhelm the islands' capacity to respond.

A joint study by British and Brazilian scientists has shown that fire incidence in the Amazon has increased in 59 per cent of areas affected by reduced deforestation, threatening the success of international efforts to reduce carbon emissions resulting from forest loss and degradation. "Changes in fire frequency could jeopardize the benefits achieved through UN-REDD [the United Nation's Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation programme] as trends in fires are the opposite to trends in deforestation. However, despite UN-REDD's vital importance in this region, fire is currently neglected in the emerging United Nations framework," said researcher Luiz Aragao at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.

The increase in fire occurrence is largely the result of leakage of fires from farms using slash and burn into surrounding forest edges and forest fragments. This must be addressed by sustainable fire-free land-management of deforested areas as part of the UN-REDD programme, Aragao concludes. "We need to change the way Amazonian people use and manage their land so that they can do this without fire. They would need financial assistance for machinery, training and technical support to enable them to comply with implementation and maintenance of fire-free management of their land," he said. The National Institute for Space Research in Brazil was partner in the research.