I wrote about how a number of participants in Cancún felt that some sense of faith had been restored in the UN process. The reviews are still coming in, but it appears that progress was indeed made, that some highly useful, indeed critical mechanisms have been advanced, and that ongoing negotiations are going to take us further along the road to an increasingly robust approach to climate and energy sanity.
Ignore the naysayers, Cancun achieved something important is the word from the FT’s eminently clued-in environment correspondent, Fiona Harvey. “…the fact that the world has in the past twelve months signed two agreements which represent the first new deals on climate change since the failed Kyoto protocol of 1997 must be regarded as important progress.” Indeed. See also this lucid, succinct video of Harvey’s summary of what good came out of the recent talks.
Meanwhile, the chief US climate envoy, Todd Stern, held a briefing the other day in which he highlighted the importance of COP 16 having “anchored” the most important part of the Copenhagen Accord: the commitment by all nations for substantive reductions in emissions. In Stern’s view, Cancún provides for “….a system of transparency with substantial detail and content…” that “…will provide confidence that a country’s pledges are being carried out…” Measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) are, in a word, essential.
The very good people at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change have this useful summary. Although the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012, there was agreement on a number of important points including that the protocol’s emissions trading and project-based mechanisms will continue to be available to developed countries as a means of meeting their targets and that “land use-related measures to reduce emissions and enhance GHG removals will also count toward parties’ targets.” A key failing in the 1997 agreement in Kyoto was the exclusion of land-use from the Clean Development Mechanism. Thus, reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, aka REDD+, continues to gain significant traction. (A key participant in the Earth Summit in 1992 told me recently that they should have had a Convention on Forestry then, but that an important country shot the idea down as an infringement on “sovereignty.”)
There’s enough here to digest for now. In the words of an inimitable movie character, played by an even-more inimitable California Governator: “I’ll be back.”
