Bali talks go to the brink

Bali, 13 December: The UN climate talks in Bali are heading for a typical 11th hour showdown, as the EU and US square off over the inclusion of emissions targets in a roadmap for the next round of climate negotiations.

Today, the UN's climate chief, Yvo de Boer, told a press conference that he was "very concerned about the pace of things ... we're in an all or nothing situation".

Ministers are hoping to hammer out guidelines for negotiating a new international agreement, to be concluded by the end of 2009, to replace the Kyoto Protocol, whose emissions caps expire in 2012. The EU wants to include a non-binding goal of reducing industrialised world emissions by 25-40% against 1990 levels by 2020.

The US is arguing that the inclusion of that range would "pre-judge" the talks.

In the latest twist, the EU today threatened to boycott a parallel US process, the so-called major economies meeting, which brings together large developing countries alongside the G8. The US is proposing to hold a meeting in Hawaii in January.

"If we would have a failure in Bali it would be meaningless to have a major economies' meeting" in the US, said Humberto Rosa, Portugal's secretary of state for environment, Reuters reported. Portugal holds the EU's rotating presidency, and is therefore leading negotiations for the bloc.

Meanwhile, de Boer, the executive secretary of the UN climate change secretariat, has been attempting to downplay the importance of an emissions number in the text. "What I'd hoped for from this meeting was the launch of negotiations. If the numbers stay in, we will have achieved more than I expected," he told reporters.

“This conference will not produce specific emission reduction targets by country,” de Boer said earlier this week. “Its delivery will be the launch of negotiations. I don’t think it would be a poor agreement [if the final text did not include targets].”

Environmental groups disagreed. “25-40% is a key battleground,” Tony Juniper, vice-chairman of Friends of the Earth International, told Environmental Finance. “We see 40% as a minimum – the latest suite of climate science is really terrifying. We’ve got a narrowing window of opportunity.”

The talks are due to conclude on Friday, but they are likely to continue into Saturday morning. Today, de Boer said that it was imperative a draft text was agreed by mid-day Friday, to allow time for it to be translated into the six official languages of the UN, and considered by negotiators before going to a vote by the plenary of the conference.

Elsewhere, the meeting has made some progress, including the long-delayed launch of the Adaptation Fund. It will channel 2% of carbon finance revenues from Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects to the developing world, to help the poorest countries adapt to the impacts of climate change.

A limited CDM reform package was agreed, including exhortations to improve its operation, the waiving of certain registration fees for projects in the least developed countries, and increase the threshold for certain small-scale projects.

Agreement is also apparently close on guidelines for demonstration projects to award carbon credits for reducing emissions from deforestation or degradation – or ‘REDD’. The Kyoto Protocol offers no incentives for avoiding deforestation in developing countries, but a post-2012 climate treaty is likely to seek to tackle the issue. Deforestation has, for example, catapulted Indonesia, the host of the climate talks, to the number three global emitter.