Paris Climate Agreement In Disarray As Developing Countries Demand Long-Promised $100 Billion P.A. From Richer Nations
The holdup threatens to unravel three years of work on the Paris Agreement, which set out an ambition to limit fossil-fuel pollution in all nations Two weeks of climate talks organized by the United Nations finished with developing countries demanding more clarity from their richer counterparts on when a promised package of $100 billion in aid will materialize. Envoys from almost 200 nations are leaving Bonn, Germany, on Thursday without producing a draft negotiating text for ministers to discuss at the end of the year. Instead, they planned another round of negotiations in Bangkok before their annual conference in Poland in December. The holdup threatens to unravel three years of work to complete the Paris Agreement, a landmark deal reached in 2015 that set out an ambition to limit fossil-fuel pollution in all nations for the first time. Negotiators are working toward writing a rule book that will help bring the pact into force even as U.S. President Donald Trump vowed to withdraw from the Paris framework. “Sharp political differences remain on a handful of issues, especially on climate finance and the amount of differentiation in the Paris Agreement rules for countries at varying stages of development,” said Alden Meyer, who has been following the talks for more than two decades for the Union of Concerned Scientists. “These issues are above the pay grade of negotiators in Bonn and will require engaging ministers and national leaders.” Tensions have been building for years on the matter of financing that industrial nations promised developing ones to pay for transforming their economies to run on clean energy — and to cope with the more violent storms and rising sea levels associated with higher global temperatures. Rich countries led by the U.S. and European Union pledged in 2009 to ramp up climate-related aid to $100 billion a year by 2020. While they have made progress on that commitment, reaching $62 billion in 2014 according to one official study, developing nations want more detail on what money is coming before signing up to the Paris rules. Developing nations are being asked for more transparency on the emissions they produce — and to open up to some sort of process for verifying that information. Many of them are concerned that will add expensive and cumbersome bureaucracy — or that richer nations will use those tools to limit trade. Richer countries see the rules as essential to making credible the pollution cuts that the Paris deal promises. “If you don’t have policies that underpin the number that’s been put in Paris, you’ve got nothing to drive progress,” said Elina Bardram, a European Commission official who’s head of the EU delegation at the talks in Bonn. Developing nations say that a rebound in the cost of carbon emissions in Europe is creating pools of new cash that might come their way. As industrial countries take on tighter emission targets, they may buy traded carbon credits from poorer nations, said Wael Aboulmagd, an Egyptian ambassador who was speaking for the group of developing nations called G77 & China. “People are anticipating that down the road this is going to be a significant contributor to the balancing of emissions with trade issues and enticement for countries to show more ambition,” Aboulmagd said. Patricia Espinosa, who leads the UN body organizing the talks, said at a press conference in Bonn that the past two weeks were a “productive session,” although “there continues to be more progress on some issues than others.” The work of creating a text was supposed to be completed in Bonn and now will shift to another meeting to be convened in Bangkok later this year. The extra time would be used to produce clear options for the end-of-year session in Katowice, Poland, which will be attended by ministers and world leaders. Full post
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