Shocked, Shocked: Bonn Round Of Climate Negotiations "Descending Into Chaos"
Virtually no one should be surprised to learn that climate talks currently underway in Bonn, Germany -- the latest venue for the decades-old and largely fruitless pursuit of international agreement on global warming action -- are descending into chaos. This time around, Russia, along with Ukraine and Belarus, are facing off with other nations and effectively blocking movement on negotiations fundamental to forward progress -- including how to provide financial assistance for poorer nations grappling with the worst impacts of a warming planet.
The Slavic negotiators are apparently miffed about their treatment during talks in Doha, Qatar, last year, where they say their concerns over extending the Kyoto Protocol -- currently the world's only obligatory climate agreement, albeit one that excluded the largest polluters and has proved largely ineffectual -- were ignored. The current impasse threatens to undermine the Bonn talks altogether, sending the tireless caravan of negotiators to Warsaw, Poland -- site of this year's annual United Nations climate fête -- with little to show in the way of agreement on anything at all.
"Governments need to look up from their legal and procedural tricks and focus on the planetary emergency that is hitting Africa first and hardest," declared Mithika Mwenda, coordinator of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance, which represents the interests of myriad poor nations on the continent, in a statement circulated to the press on Wednesday. "Russia's shenanigans have set back critical work on loss and damage mechanisms and so now Poland, as host of the next summit, must find a way to ensure this issue is dealt with fully."
Whether that will happen is anybody's guess, of course. What's clear is that while nations have dickered, bickered, ducked and weaved over the last two decades, global emissions of greenhouse gases have ticked steadily upward -- mostly fueled by booming new economies like China's and India's. By some measures, the Kyoto agreement (which mostly bound the rich nations of Europe to emissions reduction targets, while the U.S. famously refused to participate) yielded some success, if emissions are measured on a strict nation-by-nation basis.
EDIT
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-zeller-jr/global-climate-negotiations_b_3428796.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
