Tiempo Climate Newswatch

The customary jockeying for negotiating position took place in the days before the Durban Climate Change Conference. The United States is pushing for greater private-sector involvement in the Green Climate Fund, while Saudi Arabia is demanding higher compensation for oil-producing countries who would lose income as fossil fuel use declined. "We need to discuss whether we can continue to divide the world in the traditional thinking of the North and the South, where the North has to commit to a binding form whereas the South will only have to commit in a voluntary form," said Connie Hedegaard, European climate commissioner.

Brazil and India, members of the BASIC group of nations, have confirmed that they are in agreement that the Durban summit should ensure the second commitment period of Kyoto Protocol. "The survival of the Kyoto Protocol system means the survival of the top-down approach, which in our view is the approach that should guide the future of the international fight against climate change," said Brazil's climate change ambassador Luiz Alberto Figueiredo Machado. The second commitment period would end in 2020 and it is proposed that talks on a new global deal covering the post-2020 period start in 2015. "We are going to have a review of the current actions from 2013-15 and then the fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, so both things happening at the same time will certainly signal a good time to engage into a renewed phase of negotiations looking at the post-2020 architecture," the ambassador said.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has released the Summary for Policymakers of its forthcoming report on extreme events and climate change. Looking to the future, the assessment concludes that it is virtually certain that world-wide hot days become more extreme and more frequent. "For the high emissions scenario, it is likely that the frequency of hot days will increase by a factor of ten in most regions of the world", said Thomas Stocker, co-chair of IPCC Working Group I. "Likewise, heavy precipitation will occur more often, and the wind speed of tropical cyclones will increase while their number will likely remain constant or decrease."

The report is cautious in attributing recent events to climate change. "There is high confidence that both maximum and minimum daily temperatures have increased on a global scale due to the increase of greenhouse gases," Qin Dahe, co-chair of IPCC Working Group I, said. "Changes in other extremes, such as more intense and longer droughts are observed in some regions, but the assessment assigns medium confidence due to a lack of direct observations and a lack of agreement in the available scientific studies. Confidence in any long-term trend in tropical cyclone intensity, frequency or duration is assessed to be low," he continued.

More than 100 researchers in 15 nations have produced the first comprehensive assessment of climate change in the western Pacific region to help nations prepare for and adapt to climate change. The report, from the Australian government's Pacific Climate Change Science Program, concludes that the Pacific region is warming, sea levels are rising, rainfall patterns are changing and equatorial winds have weakened.

More natural disasters from events such as landslides are predicted, as well as damage to coral reef ecosystems and accelerating sea-level rise. Biological productivity and fishing may be affected as ocean mixing is inhibited by warmer, less salty water at the surface. There are likely to be fewer tropical cyclones, though they may be more intense when they do occur. Co-author Kevin Hennessy from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia, said that the impact of these trends would vary according to factors such as geography and landscape. "Some of the low lying coral atolls are especially exposed to sea level rise and storm tides and most of the countries that we've look at are exposed to changes in tropical cyclones except those that are right along the equator," he said. "And many of the mountainous countries in the region are particularly exposed to landslides." Information about the future climate of the Pacific nations can be accesses through a new interactive online tool called Pacific Climate Futures.