John Lanchbery, Principal Climate Adviser
A week ago in Warsaw they were putting out the bunting for Polish National Day. This weekend they have been putting up the Christmas decorations, and very nice they are too.
It is half time at the UN climate change conference in the national football stadium. Meetings ran through to four o’clock in the morning on both Friday and Saturday, or rather on Saturday and Sunday, as civil servants tried to conclude all of the technical work before their ministers began to arrive on Sunday.
Some matters remain stuck, such as next year’s budget over which there is always disagreement. Quite a lot of technical issues are delayed too. All of the land use and forestry issues that I follow closely are agreed except for a decision on whether or not to have a new committee to oversee REDD+ (reducing emissions from deforestation in developing countries). However, as us NGOs don’t want an new institution we are pleased with the hold-up rather than being upset.
Today, the Polish Government is staging a coal summit in tandem with the UN climate change meeting. This has provoked a lot of criticism, not just from environment and development groups but from governments too. In practice, however, it is unlikely to materially affect the UN process. Finance for developing country efforts is meant to be the big subject this week and there is a ministerial meeting on the subject. We are not, however, holding our breath for a good outcome because most of the developed countries have already indicated that they will not have much to offer, except for Japan which is offering $16 billion. We think that this is, at least in part, out of shame for having last week changed their 25% emission reduction target for 2020 into a 3% emission increase target. There may be more money for forests, though. The UK, USA, German and Norwegian ministers have called a press conference for Wednesday on further finance for REDD+.
Last week, the USA seemed to be behaving better than they have in the past. This may partly be because, in comparison, their usual allies have been behaving very badly, especially Australia and Japan, egged on from the bottom of the denial pit by Canada. (We have invented a new country for the bad boys called Japolia.) Some of us had a good, frank meeting with the head of the US delegation last week and, although far from perfect, much of what he said made sense. It appears that John Kerry’s active involvement with climate policy is having an effect. Today or tomorrow we will have a meeting with Chinese Minister Xie to see what he says.
From a forests and land use perspective, one very good thing has happened at this meeting. We have been banging on for the last two years about the need for a common way of reporting and accounting for emissions and removals from land use in the new treaty to be concluded in 2015. This may seem a small thing but deforestation in developing countries alone accounts for about 15% of all human-induced emissions. Land use as a whole probably represents about a quarter of all emissions.
Yet there are different ways of estimating what emissions and removals are for different countries, making it very hard to compare country’s commitments to reduce emissions. The EU, for example, accounts in a different way to both the USA (with a huge forest area) and Brazil (with an even bigger one). About three quarters of all Brazil’s emissions come from land use change, mainly deforestation, and a major part of its emission reduction commitment will come from slowing deforestation. What we have been saying for years should be on the agenda, is now on the agenda: common accounting for land use in all countries is being discussed. There were technical discussions last week and now high level discussions chaired by the Finnish and Indonesian Ministers.
Worth a small hurray, at least!