Treading carefully at Cancun

THE lessons of Copenhagen have been learned and big promises are off the agenda.

Sierra Club activists, dressed in the flags of 20 countries, bury their heads in the sand during a protest in Cancun. Picture: AP

THE lessons of Copenhagen have been learned and big promises are off the agenda.

AFTER the crashed hopes of Copenhagen, a much reduced contingent of climate change negotiators and their non-government entourage has flocked to the Mexican beach resort city of Cancun to continue the push for global action.

The protesters are still there but the hype of Copenhagen is missing.

Unlike Copenhagen, there is little if any expectation at Cancun that a global agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions can be reached.

For many, the best outcome will be if the countries represented can agree to keep the discussions for a post-Kyoto agreement alive so they can continue in South Africa next year.

There has already been a hiccup, with Japan rejecting calls by the European Union for the Kyoto Protocol, which is due to expire at the end of 2012, to be extended.

Japan argues the protocol is unfair because it makes no demands of developing nations such as China, the world's biggest carbon emitter, or the US, which is in second place.

Like Copenhagen, the big challenge for Cancun revolves around finding a way to bring together the differing positions of the developed and developing countries.

The diplomatic language at Cancun revolves around managed progress to achieve a set of balanced outcomes.

The lesson from Copenhagen, where the disappointment of failing to reach consensus for a post-Kyoto agreement was magnified by the heightened expectations that there would be one, has been learned.

Politically, the big mistake was to over-promise and under-deliver.

In Cancun, things have been reversed. Negotiators are anxious to under-promise so that any progress can be claimed as a victory.

Welcoming senior politicians from across the world, Cancun conference president Patricia Espinosa said one week into the Cancun negotiations that conditions were in place to reach a "broad and balanced package of decisions" that would lead to an era of increasingly effective global action on climate change.

"However, the positive outcome our societies demand is still not complete," she said.

So, after a week of preliminaries, the business end of proceedings is about to begin.

Australia's Climate Change Minister Greg Combet has arrived in Cancun with a small team of senior advisers.

It is a far cry from Copenhagen, which was attended by then prime minister Kevin Rudd, several federal ministers and a slew of delegates from state governments as well as non-governmental organisations.

The atmosphere also reflects the more sober appraisal of many within the scientific community following a year of scandals over leaked emails and inclusion of inappropriate research in the most recent UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

A new study by a group of Britain's leading climate science institutions, released at Cancun yesterday, has confirmed the likely effect of global warming.

It says that while apocalyptic claims about the slowing down of the Gulf Stream has been exaggerated, some risks posed by a warming climate are greater than has been stated by the IPCC..

The review by the Met Office, the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research concludes: "There is overwhelming agreement on the fundamentals: that our climate is changing and this represents a real and urgent problem."

It is in this context that a draft agreement circulated at Cancun has called for a review of whether the goal should be strengthened to 1.5C in the light of warnings by scientists that the world faces growing natural disasters and extinction of species because of climate change.

At this point, Australia will consider Cancun a success if it is able to preserve its reputation as an honest broker in global negotiations with lines of communication to the US and China.

Diplomatically, Australia supports a global agreement that is capable of delivering emissions reductions to keep global temperature rises below 2C, with legally binding contributions from all leading emitters.

The Gillard government and the Coalition both support Australia unconditionally reducing pollution by 5 per cent on 2000 levels by 2020, and by up to 25 per cent, depending on commitments from other nations. Australia says it is committed to forging a post-Kyoto legally binding international climate outcome that is effective, fair and efficient.

It also stands by the Copenhagen Accord commitment to jointly mobilise $US100 billion a year by 2020 to finance meaningful and transparent mitigation action by developing countries.

Australia has pledged $599 million in fast-start finance to help developing nations, including in the area of avoiding deforestation in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.

In short, Australia's priorities for Cancun are:

► To make sure all the commitments made post-Copenhagen are bedded down.

► To ensure proper finance is available to help poorer countries clean up their economies.

► To help avoid destruction of the world's rainforests.

Australia also is pushing for development of a framework to assist the most vulnerable developing countries, such as small island states, least developed countries and African countries, adapt to the effects of climate change.

An announcement on new funding arrangements for Pacific island nations is expected this week.

Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation - or REDD, as it is known in the UN process - is likely to be one of the most tangible outcomes from Cancun.

However, there are still disputes over the details of how a REDD scheme can be implemented and how it will operate.

NGOs have expressed concern that indigenous communities may be disadvantaged by being locked out of the forests on which they depend for their subsistence.

Claims also have been made that developing countries will increasingly seek to profit by setting artificial baselines for forests that will be included in the scheme.

There is also a dispute over whether the forest agreements should be funded through direct payments or a market-based scheme in which companies pay to offset their carbon emissions elsewhere.

Australian Conservation Foundation executive director Don Henry, who is in Cancun, says it is too early to judge what progress will be made.

"I have been at five UN climate conferences and have never had a sense at the halfway mark how they are going to turn out, Henry says.

He says although Copenhagen had been disappointing in not delivering a legally binding deal, it did make important progress with an accord to limit rise in global temperatures to 2C. Follow-up target commitments offered by India, Brazil and China were quite strong after Copenhagen, according to Henry.

"One of the important things at Cancun is to build on that Copenhagen accord," he says.

"We need to bring those undertakings into the negotiating language, to give them some standing. That would be progress at Cancun."

According to Henry, there is also a reasonable chance for agreement on how to stop the cutting and burning of the world's rainforests that is responsible for 18 per cent of global emissions.

"It may need to go to South Africa next year to conclude, but it is a very big deal for our region," Henry says.

Wilderness Society campaigner Lyndon Schneiders says the society is looking for Cancun to include Australian forests in the global accounting.

"It is important to have a forest recognised as being full of carbon whether it is in the developed or developing world," Schneiders says.

Under the present rules, a forest is treated one way if it is in Canada or Australia, and a different way if it is in Indonesia.

Under the existing UN framework, the REDD process operates in the developing world and another scheme - Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry - operates in the developed countries.

The LULUCF rules do not give developed countries a credit for forest preservation but neither do they count the carbon cost of forest practices.

Schneiders says: "The Australian government has a role to play in REDD, but are they prepared to put their money where their mouth is and support mandatory counting of carbon emissions from logging?"

He says the Wilderness Society would support an "act of God" clause under which neither the carbon lost through bushfire nor that recovered through bushfire regeneration was counted.

In the area of finance, Combet has been asked to work as a co-facilitator with Bangladesh to help resolve some of the key outstanding issues.

One of the issues that will be discussed is the development of a global climate fund to help support developing countries adapt to the effects of climate change and reduce their carbon pollution.

Several options to raise the $100bn a year by 2020 have been put forward for consideration.

They include direct payments from government and a variety of levies on economic activity.

One option put forward involves a levy on all air tickets and sea freight.

Such a scheme would have a bigger effect on Australia, an island nation with a big tourism industry situated a long way from the main world centres.

Wet year was also third hottest on record

THE World Meteorological Organisation says the global average temperature this year was 0.55C warmer than pre-1990 averages, making it the third hottest since records began in 1850.

Australia bucked the trend because a La Nina - a fall in surface temperatures in the Pacific - has been blamed for floods in the eastern states, making it the third wettest year on record. Inland Australia is one of the few places to record below-average temperatures.

► November global temperatures are on a par with those in November 2005, suggesting that, despite the freeze in Britain, this year is on track for near-record levels.

► Russia has had a month-long heatwave. In Moscow, July mean temperatures were 7.6C above normal.

► The most extreme temperature anomalies occurred in most of Canada and Greenland, where annual temperatures were 3C or more above normal and across much of Africa and south Asia, where annual temperatures were 1-3C above normal.

► Heat records have been broken in 17 countries.

► Pakistan had Asia's hottest recorded day when the temperature in Mohenjo-daro reached 53.7C. Pakistan also experienced its worst floods.

► Guinea is the only country to have recorded a record low temperature this year.

► Britain, Germany, France and Norway had their coolest years since 1996 thanks to below normal winter temperatures.

► Most of the US was colder than normal. For the US as a whole it was the coldest winter since 1984-85.

► Parts of the Amazon basin were badly affected by drought with the Rio Negro, an Amazon tributary, falling to its lowest level on record.

► Parts of China experienced severe drought.