EC Welcomes Results of U.N. Climate Change Conference

December 16, 2008 // Published as a news service by IHS

Parties at the conference made a series of decisions, including work programs for 2009 that will accelerate future negotiations. Parties also reached a solution to make operational the Adaptation Fund for developing countries, which is part of the Kyoto Protocol.

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"Poznań has proved a useful staging post on the way to the Copenhagen conference a year from now, when the world must conclude an ambitious new global climate agreement for the post-2012 period," said Stavros Dimas, EC environment commissioner.

"The growing consensus over the past 10 days, including on developing a shared vision for the new global agreement, is encouraging, but there is still a huge amount of work ahead of us to reach a satisfactory agreement in Copenhagen. I very much welcome the solution to the legal problems surrounding the Adaptation Fund, which means developing countries can now start to receive funding."

Referring to the climate and energy package agreed upon at the Brussels summit meeting on Dec. 12, Dimas added, "The agreement at the Brussels summit sets an example to the rest of the world that moving towards a low-carbon society is fully compatible with continued prosperity. We now have the measures to deliver on our commitment to cut emissions 20% by 2020."

"But this can be only a first step. The latest science is telling us that developed countries as a group must reduce their emissions 30% by 2020 to prevent climate change from reaching dangerous proportions. The EU is committed to a 30% cut if other developed countries commit to comparable reductions under the Copenhagen agreement. This is what we have been arguing for in Poznań and what we will continue to argue for all the way to Copenhagen. It is now time for our partners in the developed world to put forward ambitious emission targets and join us in leadership."

Future global agreement
The conference agreed upon solid work programs on future action that maps out negotiations for 2009. This means that a draft text of a new global agreement must be tabled by June. Developed countries in the Kyoto Protocol are required to put forward their targets for limiting or reducing emissions by the next negotiating session at the end of March. Four sessions are scheduled over the year, but further meeting time could be added, as needed.

Progress was made towards developing a shared vision of the future agreement through the organization of a workshop and an informal ministerial round table on Dec. 11 during the high-level segment of the conference.

Adaptation Fund
The Adaptation Fund has been created to finance adaptation projects in developing countries, which are acknowledged to be especially vulnerable to climate change.

However its start-up has been held up by legal difficulties over practical application of the principle, agreed upon last year, that developing countries should have direct access to funding, which has raised concerns regarding oversight of how the funds are spent.

The solution reached clears the way for developing countries to start receiving project funding to strengthen their resilience to the inevitable impacts of climate change.

The fund is financed through a 2% levy on the sale of emission credits generated by emission-saving projects undertaken in developing countries under the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

Clean Development Mechanism
The European Union (EU) succeeded in getting agreement on a number of improvements to the CDM that can be implemented in the short term. These include measures to strengthen the CDM's environmental integrity and the transparency of its decision-making and to improve the quality of work done by project verifiers.

Review of the Kyoto Protocol
The Kyoto Protocol was reviewed at the conference, but no conclusions could be agreed upon. This means that a number of further improvements to the CDM that had been agreed upon were not adopted.

Reducing emissions from deforestation
Deforestation in the tropics is responsible for almost 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and it is widely recognized that this source must be addressed by the Copenhagen agreement.

In Poznań, consensus was reached on a 2009 program of work on methodological issues that are crucial for underpinning a future regime to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, a process known as REDD.

However, there was little progress on the substance of the future regime. This led to a group of developed and key tropical developing countries issuing a joint ministerial declaration committing themselves to early action on REDD. The declaration was endorsed by the EC (see IP/08/1965).

Technology transfer
The Poznań Programme on Technology Transfer for developing countries was adopted, funded by €50 million of existing resources from the Global Environmental Facility.

Source: European Commission.