Tiempo Climate Newswatch

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), has endorsed the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) as the proper forum for reaching global agreement on limiting the aviation industry's contribution to climate change. "The world will continue to need a strong aviation industry but the high-flying plane must also be a symbol of pro-active action to address climate change," she said in a video address to the Air Transport Action Group Aviation and Environment Summit in Geneva, Switzerland. "Your sector has been proactive and I welcome that... but we face major challenges and the aviation sector holds some critical keys," she continued.

The aviation industry welcomed the definition of responsibility by Figueres. Giovanni Bisignani, head of the International Air Transport Association said that Figueres had provided "a clear recognition of ICAO's responsibility to manage aviation's emissions as per the Kyoto Protocol. And critically, the concern for any conflict between UNFCCC's principle, Common But Differentiated Responsibility, and ICAO's universality has been addressed." John Byerly of the United States State Department commented that "we've had for years a conflict over whether UNFCCC and ICAO were competing areas in which we could deal with aviation and we've had states that don’t want to deal with aviation in ICAO. They want to leave everything to UNFCCC. Her message is a very clear one: That ICAO has a role and the states that constitute ICAO... they have an obligation to come up with a global framework for aviation."

Experts meeting at a workshop on forest governance and decentralization in Mexico have called for a flexible, balanced approach to the dilemmas surrounding REDD+ (reducing deforestation and forest degradation) to ensure that not just the wealthy benefit. "Good forest governance - involving transparent and inclusive relationships between governments, forests and the people who depend on them - is fundamental for ensuring that REDD+ helps forest-dependent communities move out of poverty, instead of fueling corruption and funding entrenched bureaucracies," said Elena Petkova from the Center for International Forestry Research.

Major barriers to forest governance reform in Latin America reported at the workshop included burdensome, unrealistic and contradictory government regulations, widespread disregard for owners' rights to forest use and continuing corruption and illegal logging. Positive developments were also noted, such as Brazil's progress in detecting illegal logging, Costa Rica's simplified standards for sustainable forest management and the wave of land tenure change since the 1980s, which has helped clarify the rights of rural groups, especially those of indigenous people.

The summer ice coverage over the Arctic this year was the third lowest on record, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in the United States. "The Arctic, like the globe as a whole, is warming up and warming up quickly, and we're starting to see the sea ice respond to that. Really, in all months, the sea ice cover is shrinking - there's an overall downward trend," commented Mark Serreze, NSIDC director. "Our thinking is that by 2030 or so, if you went out to the Arctic on the first of September, you probably won't see any ice at all. It will look like a blue ocean, we're losing it that quickly," he said.

As the ice disappears, Arctic wildlife is coming under ever-greater threat. "The polar bear is the best-known victim of rapid melting in the Arctic, but if we don't slash greenhouse pollution, many more creatures will follow it down the path to extinction," said Shaye Wolf of the Center for Biological Diversity in the United States. A recent report from the Center for Biological Diversity and Care for the Wild International finds the Arctic fox, the polar bear, caribou or reindeer, muskox, the Pacific walrus, the gray, beluga, bowhead and narwhal whales, the ringed, bearded, harp and ribbon seals, three seabirds - the Kittlitz's murrelet, spectacled eider and ivory gull - and a species of plankton, the sea butterfly, at particular risk.