EU urged to take the lead on climate change

The EU has been urged to take a more aggressive stance on carbon emissions in the wake of “disappointing” climate change talks in Nairobi.

Green campaigners said that the talks, which ended on Friday, had failed to take into account the rapid pace of global warming and that faster progress was needed.

The 11-day UN-sponsored conference ended in agreement on a review of the Kyoto protocol on cutting carbon emissions, but failed to set new carbon emission targets or agree a timetable for a new treaty to replace Kyoto when it expires in 2012.

Jan Kowalzig, climate campaigner at green NGO Friends of the Earth Europe, said that the negotiations had progressed “at snail’s pace”, with governments “waffling about when and how to negotiate instead of agreeing real action to cut carbon dioxide emissions”.

Kowalzig said that agreement between the world’s leading developed nations to begin talks on future cuts in CO2 emissions was a step in the right direction, but warned that no fixed end date for the talks could lead to them dragging on indefinitely.

Many governments are concerned that committing themselves to further significant cuts in greenhouse gas emissions could damage their competitiveness, especially with regard to ‘developing’ countries such as China and Brazil, which have not signed up to the climate change pact.

Discussions on how to include these developing nations within a new climate change agreement will not begin until 2008 – a date that campaigners argue is too late.

“The Stern report [on the economic impact of climate change] has made it clear that time is money with regard to climate protection,” said Green MEP Satu Hassi, who represented the European parliament at the talks.

“Against this background, it is particularly regrettable that the talks failed to give ambitious guidance or set a fixed timetable for post-2012 negotiations.”

“The EU has to take a bolder leadership role and ensure climate policy is placed at the top of the agenda for heads of state, as well as in terms of foreign policy.”

She said that an agreement to improve access to clean technology for developing countries would not go far enough towards solving the global warming problem.

“The small advances achieved in this meeting are over-shadowed by the failure to provide any certainty on the continuance of the carbon market after 2012.”

And Kowalzig argued that the €300m funding agreed for developing countries fell far short of what was needed.

“The World Bank predicts that the most vulnerable developing countries would actually need one hundred times this amount, annually,” he said.

“Rich countries are largely responsible for the climate crisis. As a matter of justice, they must now commit to far greater contributions to this fund.”

But EU negotiators preferred to put a positive spin on the outcome of the talks.

“We came here above all to drive progress on adaptation issues and pave the way for strong further action to cut emissions, and that is what we have done,” said Jan-Erik Enestam, Finland’s environment minister and the EU’s chief representative at the conference.
 
But environment commissioner Stavros Dimas agreed with the NGOs that the pace of negotiations needed to be accelerated.

“The work plan agreed here is an important step towards defining the shape of future global action, but the international community needs to step up efforts to complete the process as soon as possible,” he said.

Dimas has suggested rolling out the EU’s emissions trading scheme to other developed nations in a bid to persuade some of the world’s biggest polluters – notably the US and Australia, which did not sign Kyoto – to take a more active role.

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