US official to defend Trump stance

World leaders plead for action at UN talks

BONN, Nov 16, (AFP): An American official addressed the UN climate meeting in Bonn on Thursday, where envoys have battled to make progress in the shadow of President Donald Trump’s rejection of a global action plan.

On the penultimate day of the annual climate huddle, most countries will be represented by heads of state or cabinet ministers at a “high-level segment”, but Washington sent an acting assistant secretary of state, Judith Garber.

She replaces Thomas Shannon, number three at the State Department, who pulled out because of a “family emergency”.

Garber addressed delegates in the afternoon, just three days after White House officials drew the ire of conference-goers by hosting a sideline event defending the use of fossil fuels at a forum focused on reducing planetwarming emissions from burning coal, oil and gas.

“It was very interesting to see both the content and the tone” of Thursday’s speech,” said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Naomi Ages, a Greenpeace climate campaigner, said Garber would “likely reiterate Trump’s decision to withdraw, or try to bargain for better terms.”

Announcing Garber’s participation, the State Department emphasised that the Trump administration’s position on the climate-rescue Paris Agreement “remains unchanged”.

Eligible

“The United States intends to withdraw from the Paris Agreement as soon as it is eligible to do so, unless the president can identify terms for engagement that are more favourable to American businesses, workers, and taxpayers,” it said in a statement.

The United States ratified the hardfought global pact, championed by former president Barack Obama, just two months before Donald Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax”, was elected to the White House.

Trump announced in June that America would abandon the pact, but the rules prescribe this cannot happen until November 2020.

The US, the State Department said, “is participating in ongoing negotiations... in order to ensure a level playing field that benefits and protects US interests.”

The United States is the world’s biggest historical greenhouse gas polluter, and second only to China for currentday emissions.

Its presence at the Bonn talks has not been universally welcomed, especially as it has taken a tough line on a demand from developing countries for a firmer commitment to climate finance. BONN, Germany, Nov 16, (RTRS): Achala Abeysinghe, an expert on legal issues at the UN climate change talks, advises the chair of the world’s poorest countries at the negotiations. While she has worked with a series of “really good gentlemen” over the years, she thinks it’s high time the group was led by a woman.

A new gender action plan, set to be approved at the end of the annual climate conference on Friday in Bonn, could help make that a reality in the coming years.

The plan, which comes five years after a “gender balance” goal was first adopted in Doha to increase women’s participation in the negotiations, notes a “lack of progress” on this aim.

Mary Robinson, former Irish president, founder of her own climate justice foundation, and someone who pushed hard to ensure gender equality was enshrined in the 2015 Paris Agreement to tackle global warming, said the new plan was “a big step forward” for a UN process that initially ignored gender.

The reality is “we are slipping further away from achieving the goal of gender balance”, she warned.

Statistics cited in a recent paper from the UN climate change secretariat show the average percentage of women participating in negotiating sessions from 2008 to 2012 was about 31 percent.

After the Doha decision, the percentage of women delegates at the annual conferences, known as COPs, rose to a high of 36 percent but dropped back down to 32 percent in 2015 and 2016.

Analysis by climate news website CarbonBrief showed the proportion

The 2015 Paris Agreement, which took more than two decades to negotiate, commits countries to limiting average global warming to under two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over Industrial Revolution levels, and 1.5 C if possible, to avert calamitous climate change-induced storms, drought and sea-level rises.

Nations submitted voluntary emissions-cutting commitments to bolster the deal.

A report Wednesday said America’s withdrawal will boost global temperatures, calculated on current country pledges, by nearly half a degree Celsius by 2100, for a total of 3.2 C.

UN chief Antonio Guterres, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel led a diplomatic push Wednesday to reinvigorate the Bonn talks. has jumped back to 38 percent this year in Bonn.

But women at the talks said there was still much work to do to achieve gender equality, both at the talks and in climate change action more widely.

“We all need to understand that... if we don’t involve women in our decision-making processes — and the knowledge they have — we are not going to be living in a world that any of us want to be a part of,” said Osprey Orielle Lake, founder and co-director of the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network.

Abeysinghe, who is Sri Lankan, said that in the countries she advises at the talks, such as Bangladesh and Burundi, climate change makes existing inequalities worse, and leaves many poor women struggling to provide for their families.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, about 70 percent of the burden of collecting water for households falls on women and girls, and changing rainfall patterns could force them to travel even further in search of the essential resource, according to the New Climate Economy, a global commission.

Thilmeeza Hussain, a former negotiator for the low-lying island nation of the Maldives, said she and her peers were doing everything they could “to make sure our children don’t end up as climate refugees” as a warming planet brings rising seas.

She hopes the new gender action plan will “provide a bigger platform so that women’s voices can be amplified and better heard — and there (will) be more equal representation and resources mobilised in order for that to happen”.

Labelling climate change “the defining threat of our time”, Guterres said continued investment in fossil fuel would mean an “unsustainable future”.

Macron described climate change as “the most significant struggle of our time”, while Merkel said it was “a, if not the, central challenge of mankind.”

But the German chancellor was criticised for not announcing a phaseout of coal, which still provides about 40 percent of Germany’s electricity needs.

Since Monday last week, bureaucrats in Bonn have been haggling over a Paris Agreement “rule book” which will specify how countries must calculate and report their emissions cuts.

Now it is the turn of energy and environment ministers to unlock the toughest political issues.