{{In Bonn Germany, the UN climate talks are going nowhere, as politicians dither or bicker while the pace of warming dangerously speeds up, one of the architects of the Kyoto Protocol has said.}}<\/p>\n
\u201cIt seems to me that negotiations are returning to square one,\u201d said Raul Estrada, the \u201cfather\u201d of the world\u2019s only treaty to specify curbs in greenhouse gases, as the first talks for a new global pact took place in Bonn.<\/p>\n
Estrada has defended his beleaguered accord and said efforts to engineer a replacement were in trouble.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are throwing the dice and then we advance three or four places. Then you throw again and you go back. This is the exercise on climate,\u201d said the Argentine ex-diplomat who steered the historic 1997 conference which yielded Kyoto\u2019s framework.<\/p>\n
Kyoto binds 37 rich nations to reducing carbon emissions but does not have any targeted commitments for poor economies.<\/p>\n
It is a format that critics say is hopelessly out of date today, given that China, India and Brazil are now giant emitters.<\/p>\n
Kyoto\u2019s first roster of pledges expires at the end of the year. Renewing it is one of several keys to unlocking a wider deal to be completed by 2015 and take effect by 2020.<\/p>\n
Kyoto \u201cis an excellent source of experience for any successor treaty,\u201d Estrada said.<\/p>\n
He added he had \u201cserious concerns\u201d about the 2020 negotiations launched last December in South Africa under the 194-party UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).<\/p>\n
Senior officials met last week in Bonn for the first round of talks to follow up the so-called Durban Platform. <\/p>\n
The 11-day parlay ended on May 25.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is very little science in the discussion, mostly political interests or political arguments trying to use things that were decided 20 or 30 years ago,\u201d Estrada said.<\/p>\n
With climate discussions in a fragile state since the chaotic 2009 Copenhagen Summit, Estrada said political and economic problems at home were preventing many countries from tackling climate change with the urgency it needed.<\/p>\n
New research recently predicted Earth\u2019s temperature rising by as much as five degrees Celsius (9.0 degrees Fahrenheit) from pre-industrial levels on current pledges, instead of the 2 C (3.6 F) limit targeted under the UNFCCC banner.<\/p>\n
He pointed the finger at countries that had failed to live up to their Kyoto undertakings.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m frustrated by those governments with whom we adopted the protocol unanimously in Kyoto, not by consensus but unanimously and later didn\u2019t ratify it like the US or, having ratified the protocol, now they don\u2019t comply with it, like Canada and Italy,\u201d said Estrada.<\/p>\n
Kyoto, which came into force in 2005, envisioned a five-per cent reduction of warming gas emissions by rich countries by 2012 from 1990 levels.<\/p>\n
Globally, though, emissions have leapt to ever greater heights, driven especially by emerging giants which are burning coal to power their growth.<\/p>\n
The United States signed but did not ratify the accord, while Russia and Japan have said they did not intend to sign up after Kyoto expires this year.<\/p>\n
Canada has become the only country to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol, and recently said it would not achieve the target of reducing emissions by 17 per cent by 2020 from 2005 levels.<\/p>\n
Estrada said the new 2020 pact must include emission targets not only for countries but for industrial sectors, too — \u201cthe amount of carbon you are going to emit by ton of iron or steel or 1,000 megawatts or something like that.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
{{In Bonn Germany, the UN climate talks are going nowhere, as politicians dither or bicker while the pace of warming dangerously speeds up, one of the architects of the Kyoto Protocol has said.}} \u201cIt seems to me that negotiations are returning to square one,\u201d said Raul Estrada, the \u201cfather\u201d of the world\u2019s only treaty to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[75],"byline":[334],"hashtag":[],"class_list":["post-2453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-homenews","byline-igihe-reporter"],"bylines":[{"id":334,"name":"IGIHE Reporter","slug":"igihe-reporter","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":null}],"contributors":[{"id":334,"name":"IGIHE Reporter","slug":"igihe-reporter","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":null}],"featured_image":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2453\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2453"},{"taxonomy":"byline","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/byline?post=2453"},{"taxonomy":"hashtag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtag?post=2453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}