‘Kick-start climate pact before ’20’

Climate-hit nations ask who will pay for disasters?

BONN, Germany, Nov 9, (RTRS): Emerging nations pressed developed countries on Wednesday to step up cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 to kick-start the Paris climate agreement, saying the rich were wrongly focused on 2030 goals.

“We came here needing to hit the accelerator, not the brakes,” Brazil’s chief negotiator Antonio Marcondes told Reuters on the sidelines of the Nov 6-17 negotiations in Germany on limiting global warming.

In 2015, almost 200 governments agreed the Paris accord to end the fossil fuel era by 2100 and remained united last year in declaring action “irreversible” after Donald Trump, who has called man-made climate change a hoax, won the US presidential election. But that unity is fraying. Under the Paris Agreement, most governments set targets for cutting emissions by 2030, with little focus on shorter-term milestones.

Brazil and nations including India, China and Iran now want to fill the gap with more action by 2020 to cut greenhouse gas emissions, especially by the rich which have burnt most fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution.

“While action on (the) post-2020 period under the Paris Agreement has gained momentum, the discussions on pre-2020 actions have lagged behind,” India’s chief negotiator Ravi S. Prasad said earlier this week.

Developed nations say they are acting. European Union officials pointed to proposals on Wednesday for tougher car emissions targets including a credit system for carmakers to encourage the rollout of electric vehicles.

Nazhat Shameem Khan, chief negotiator for Fiji, which is presiding at the meeting, said: “Clearly there is strong appetite for a constructive and focused discussion on pre-2020.

“I think it’s a generalised view ... that there hasn’t been enough discussion”

as the consensus view of 13 federal agencies concluded that more than 92 percent of the observed rise in global average temperatures since 1950 is the direct result of human activity. Since 1900, Earth has warmed by 1.8 degrees (1 degree Celsius) and seas have risen by 8 inches. Heat waves, downpours and wildfires have become frequent.

White served under former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, now Trump’s energy secretary, for six years on a commission overseeing that state’s environmental agency. White was fiercely critical of what she called the Obama administration’s “imperial EPA” and pushed about what to do before 2020, she said.

Overall, she said the talks, also working on a detailed rule book for the Paris Agreement, were advancing well and that the United States delegation was being “constructive and helpful”.

Trump said in June he would pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, a process that will take effect in 2020, and instead promote coal and oil.

A pullout will isolate the United States since Syria, the only other nation outside the pact, said on Tuesday it would join.

Under the Paris Agreement, the period to 2020 is a gap partly because backers of the 2015 pact assumed it might take years for parliaments to ratify it. The deal entered into force in record time last November.

Camilla Born, of the E3G think-tank, said the Paris Agreement was now a victim of its own success. “It’s right now to shine the spotlight on more action by 2020,” she said.

Storms

As climate change-driven storms, floods and other disasters bring escalating financial losses, how will the costs be paid? That’s a crucial question at the UN climate talks in Bonn this week.

Researchers say losses from droughts, sea level rise and other climate-driven shocks are likely to reach hundreds of billions of dollars a year by 2030 if planet-warming emissions continue unabated.

Just the cost to the United States to repair the damage caused by this year’s hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria — in Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands — is estimated to be tens of billions of dollars.

Attempts to curb planet-warming emissions are falling short and too little progress has been made in helping communities and countries adapt to the changes. That means “loss and damage is a reality now”, said Saleemul Huq,

back against stricter limits on air and water pollution. (AP)

Volcano ash drifts over Alaska:

An ash plume drifting from a Russia volcano has prompted flight cancellations in northern Alaska.

William Walsh, a spokesman for Ravn Alaska, says the airline canceled flights Wednesday to and from Kotzebue and Deadhorse, the supply hub for the Prudhoe Bay oil fields.

Alaska Airlines officials say no flights director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh.

The question of who might pay the mounting costs of disasters is a controversial one at the talks.

Developed countries — as the biggest emitters of greenhouse gas emissions — have been reluctant to discuss the costs, fearing they could be held liable.

“There are currently no funds set up for loss and damage — that’s the main challenge, and what we want to see happening,” said Harjeet Singh, global lead on climate change for ActionAid International. Plans for addressing loss and damage within the UN process are enshrined in the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage, established in 2013.

The mechanism was created in the face of opposition from the United States and some other industrialised countries that worried it could be used to make them pay for the costs of climate damage.

Four years on, though, the fledgling mechanism has received little finance or resources. Its experts are due to produce a technical paper on possible sources of finance by 2019, which suggests “nothing much is going to happen for the next two years”, said Singh. “We have no clarity on where money is going to come from.”

Developing countries looking for ways to address rising losses, however, say it’s time to make the process begin to work.

Fiji’s ambassador for climate change, Nazhat Shameem Khan, told Reuters: “Having been negotiated with so much difficulty, it’s important that we ... should try to make (the Warsaw International Mechanism) work effectively.”

Developed countries have looked at insurance as one way to cut the risks of extreme weather for poorer countries and distribute recovery funds quickly in the aftermath of a disaster.

were immediately affected.

Dave Schneider with the Alaska Volcano Observatory says the cloud originated from the Sheveluch Volcano on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, which erupted Tuesday, sending an ash cloud about 26,000 feet into the atmosphere. The plume drifted over parts of northern Alaska on Wednesday.

The volcano is about 1,350 miles (2,172 kms) southwest of Kotzebue. (AP)

EU to cut car emissions:

The European Union on Wednesday proposed sharp automobile emission cuts over the next decade to support the Paris climate accord and compete with China by spurring electric car production.

The European Commission, the EU executive, called for cutting carbon dioxide emissions from cars and vans by 30 percent by 2030 and 15 percent by 2025, compared with 2021.

The proposal has to be approved by the 28 member states and the European Parliament.

“We need to act to meet our global climate commitments and cut our oil dependence,” EU Climate and Energy Commissioner Miguel Arias Canete told a press conference. He said a rise in road transport emissions since 1990 is “clearly at odds” with EU pledges to cut greenhouse gases under the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

“We need to act to keep Europe’s car industry competitive and innovative,” Canete added as he introduced a proposal aimed at promoting hybrid and electric car production.

“We will lose technological leadership in clean vehicles if the United States, Japan and China keep accelerating away from us,” he warned. (AFP)