By Desie Heita
WINDHOEK – The just ended round of discussions on climate change in Lima, Peru, ended with a sense of hope that emerging nations, and the United States, will submit new concrete proposals to cut carbon emissions and fund climate change coping mechanisms when the countries meet again in France next year.
The Lima conference was marked by intense negotiations, with the emerging nations of India and China finally reaching a consensus with Europe and the USA on the final text, a modest agreement that is seen as the building blocks of a deal due to be agreed on in Paris next year.
The Paris conference is expected to ratify a new deal that replaces the current agreement, which until now has wedged a gap on how to tackle climate change between the rich and poor nations.
“We believe that Paris will be a defining moment on whether or not we can successfully tackle global warming. Paris would put up a test whether or not we are truly a nations united in common solidarity. Paris would be a test to prove whether or not we can save the lives of our future generations on this planet,” Uahekua Herunga, the Minister of Environment and Tourism told the Lima conference.
The new text produced over the weekend after the wrap-up of the conference invites actions by all nations to combat warming while recognising the “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, in light of different national circumstances”.
It is a text distinct from the 1992 text that blamed the rich for gas emissions and compelled the rich to pay and take the lead in cutting emissions, while saying little of the emerging economies’ responsibilities. At the recent conference, the EU and US pushed that the world has changed, and much of the developing world has to answer to its share of emissions.
The other part of the tension was also on the issue of funding, as the developed and developing world looked at one another to cough up much of the funds.
“The tension between the developed and developing countries crystallise around the question of funding,” said Namibian parliamentarian, Moses Amweelo, who was the Namibian parliamentary group’s leader to Lima’s 20th Conference of Parties (COP20).
The new binding agreement that is to be signed in 2015 is expected to see rich countries given stricter objectives, because they are deemed to have a greater share of the responsibility for climate change.
“The negotiations made good progress compared to the previous conference,” said Amweelo, also the Deputy Chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Union National Group, adding that it is up to mankind to solve the problem that it created.
“The solution is the total transformation of our energy sector. [US Secretary of the State John] Kerry claimed that this was the greatest economic opportunity in the history of the world. The technology is already out there, and the cost of renewable and alternative energy is already cheaper than the real costs of fossil fuel energy, which include the horrifying impacts of global warming and asthma attacks.”
The donation to the Green Climate Fund due to help developing nations cut their greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change, fractionally surpassed a U.N. goal of US$10 billion, helped by donations from Australia and Belgium.
The conference also reiterated a goal for developed nations to mobilise US$100 billion a year, in public and private funds, in climate aid for developing nations by 2020.
Developing nations wanted rich nations to set a clear timetable for scaling up funds by year. But a text merely “requested” that developed nations “enhance the available quantitative and qualitative elements of a pathway” toward 2020.