14 December 2007

Climate Negotiations At Bali

When the media aren't covering "Canoe Man" or Fabio Capello, they occasionally go to a correspondant at the climate change negotiations at the Bali summit.

How many chats around the water-cooler have you had over the last week about the climate talks? What emerges from them will guide governments from now until 2025.

From the media coverage of negotiations at Kyoto, my perception was that Kyoto was watered down, and watered down, and then watered down some more, to try and get countries like Canada, the US and Australia on board. Even then, for the 10 years since Kyoto, we have countries like Japan, Spain and Italy breaking their commitments. Whatever agreement is reached, we need to hold our governments to account -- local, regional, national, and at the European level.

What a "Bali Treaty" needs is a kind of, that word again, Marshall Plan, to transfer zero-carbon technology to industrialising developing countries.

70% of the carbon surge over the next 25 years will originate in developing countries - most of it in India and China. From a climate change perspective, Asia has three critical ingredients that add up to crisis: high growth, large populations, and an energy system fuelled by large reserves of coal ... Developed country governments need to create economically enabling environments for developing countries to produce lower emissions without compromising poverty reduction goals.
David Shukman of BBC News popped away from the air-conditioned climate talks to talk with a local rice farmer:

We talked about how Mangku Candra is faring. The weather has become unpredictable, he told me. The rains arrive late and haven't delivered enough water in the past four years. Yields of rice on his small plot are down by about a quarter. For a subsistence farmer, this really matters. And it's a foretaste of what the UN climate panel said could happen in South-East Asia - changing patterns could threaten crops and the availability of food for millions of people.

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