Even as the world prepares for the grand climate meet at Copenhagen this December, a large part of South India has gone under water. And while talks have already begun on coming up with an equitable deal and the very fear that there may be none, over 300 people have already lost their lives while millions are displaced and missing in this global warming related freak weather event, predicted well in advance by the IPCC in its Fourth Assessment Report in 2007.

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Just as it seemed that differences over contentious issues regarding the next climate treaty were ironing out and all parties moving ahead with a common agenda, the developed countries, US in particular, threatened to stall negotiations until developing countries pledge equal emission reduction measures.

According to new reports, American negotiators demanded that there should be similar mitigation obligations for developed as well developing countries. The demand was strictly against the unanimous decision to draw distinction between capacities of developed and developing nations to reduce carbon emissions taken at the Bali Climate Conference in 2007.

Developing countries, led by India, opposed the demand in one voice and forced the American negotiators to back down.

United States’ stance came as a surprise given that officials from the Obama administration have been in constant talks with various developing countries and that these talks have resulted in many developing countries agreeing to voluntary emission reduction plans. It was that since the carbon output of most developing countries is much less than that of developed countries and that they are not technically and financially equipped to take up bold mitigation measures a clear differentiation between mitigation measures taken up by the two parties.

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It seems unlikely that an agreement on the terms of the next climate treaty could be reached at the December-scheduled Copenhagen talks. The United States, not a member of the Kyoto Protocol and one of the major players in the international negotiations tussle over the climate treaty, has not yet reached a consensus over how to reduce carbon emissions and a bill successfully passing through the Senate in 2009 seems quite difficult.

The major issues that US lawmakers need to look into are, first, how to make the transition from carbon-intensive fossil fuels to clean renewable energy sources and, second, how to finance this transition without burdening the people with any significant monetary load.

The proposed carbon trading scheme has attracted criticism from the environmentalists since it allows the government to distribute emission permits to the industries free of cost. A bill proposing a nationwide carbon tax was also introduced in the US Congress but experts fear that, if implemented, the bill would put a financial burden of more than $1000 per year on the US households.

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Developed nations have so far ignored the guidelines and warning issued by the UNFCCC regarding the amounts of carbon emissions that they need to reduce by the year 2020 in order to prevent a climatic catastrophe.

According to the scientific panel of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the world must cumulatively reduce its carbon emissions by at least 25 to 40 percent in order to mitigate the adverse effects of global warming. However, during the ongoing round of Climate Change Talks at Bonn, Germany, the developed nations have failed to come up with convincing targets for reducing their greenhouse gas outputs.

While the European Union has made it clear to notch up its 20 percent reduction target by 2020 to 30 percent if rest of the developed nations agree to a 20 percent reduction target, there has been poor response from countries like Australia, United States and Japan.

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As we evolve towards a new global climate change policy regime at Copenhagen later this year via the negotiations currently going on in Bonn, a willingness to step in each other’s shoes gets more and more critical and primary.

On one hand are the developing countries like India, where emphasis has been on highlighting how its measures conform to the needs of the hour and of the globe. Its adaptation initiative on Himalayas and other, mitigation initiatives (solar, water, sustainability, energy efficiency, etc.) all aim at moving India and the world one step closer to a better environmental situation.  It is a more practical way of doing things to plan on both environment and development together – rather than on viewing them in traditional typecast of development versus environment. So, the rural employment scheme under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) that generates bulk of (70%) employment in environment-improving schemes is particularly heartening.  NREGA’s green jobs in afforestation, sustainable agriculture, water harvesting, etc. will not only provide employment to one person in a family but will also do so in areas that will alleviate emission-problems. 

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We’re coming at you live with more special Red, Green, and Blue coverage from New York’s very own Wall Street Green Trading Summit.

It’s Lunchtime now at the WSGTS, and I just emerged from another dizzying bout of acronyms to find myself totally shocked by how little I know about big market investing. Fortunately, I stumbled on Open Carbon World, an open source project on carbon footprints that is here at the conference.  They have accumulated the following glossary of terms, acronyms and etc. to help novices like me navigate these crazy fast talking presentations.  If I drop one or two over the next few days, please forgive the frazzled brain, and give them a look up!  

>> More Wall Street Green Trading Summit:  The Species Bank?, Carbon Markets, Solar Panels and the Electric Grid

OCW is presenting tomorrow, so I’ll reserve final judgment ’til then, but expect a post on some sweet open source ideas having to do with footprints and offsets.

OCW is presenting tomorrow, so I’ll reserve final judgment ’til then, but expect a post on some sweet open source ideas having to do with footprints and offsets.

OK, so Carbon Trading, huh?

The murky mysteries of the market continue to elude me.  The second session today was all about the carbon offset market: where the money is, where the investment opportunities are and will be, and who is making the rules about what a carbon offset even means.

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We’re coming at you live with special Red, Green, and Blue coverage from New York’s very own Wall Street Green Trading Summit.

The WSGTS claims to be the longest running and most comprehensive environmental market event in the industry (and we have no reason to doubt them!)

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While reporting a 50 percent increase in the number of projects approved under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), the administrators at the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) acknowledged that the carbon trading system requires an overhaul. This is the first time that the UNFCCC has conceded to the fact that the CDM has loopholes which need to be filled in order to make the next climate treaty a success.

CDM is a tool incorporated in the Kyoto Protocol which helps industrialized nations to meet their emissions-reduction targets through investments low-emission projects in the developing world. It has been an instrument to spread clean energy use across the world and providing monetary assistance to the developing countries to reduce their carbon emissions. But the mechanism has had its fair share of criticism.

Critics say that projects which could have been set up without any monetary help have also been incorporated in the CDM. Many other projects which pose potential environmental threat have been approved to sell carbon credits. While approving projects like wind farms for selling carbon credits it must be ensured that the ecology of the area is not going to face any adverse effects, that no trees are cut to make space for the wind mills and that the local population has no objections with the project. These aspects have been ignored so far.

If a project has been established then it should not be considered in the application process. Thorough checks and extensive studies about the ecological, environmental and socio-economic effects must be made mandatory before the any project is approved for selling carbon credits.

For instance, for a hydroelectric project, it must be check if the displaced people have been successfully relocated to new areas, what biodiversity has been lost due to the submergence of land and what are the plans initiated to replenish it and whether the company/government has any plan about managing the methane emissions generated from the project.

Companies in India and China, which sell the lion share of global carbon credits, try to find ways of convincing their respective environmental ministries which further their recommendations to the approval agencies hired by UNFCCC. Therefore, it is important that more transparency brought in the manner in which these agencies go through the procedure of approving projects.

Taking yet another example, the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) sells carbon credits under the CDM scheme for using the eco-friendly regenerative braking system in its trains. Now, the DMRC is one of the very few metro projects in the world which manage to generate profit so why does it require money to finance this braking system. More than half of this long-term metro project has been completed and Japan has provided a major portion of the funds but now DMRC is planning to get CDM approval for the whole project itself. The DMRC wants to get approval for selling carbon credits as commuters have shifted from buses/cars thus reducing carbon emissions.

The developed nations are least bothered as they are concerned only with meeting the set emission reduction goals while the developing countries are happy to receive practically free funding for their projects. But if transparency and responsibility is not brought into the system, this whole carbon offsetting scheme would be reduced to a mere eyewash.

Instead of monetary investments technological help should be extended to the developing and poor countries because it is difficult to keep track of the funds. Every entity involved in the process - the project managers, the company involved, the environment ministry and the approving agency - must be made accountable for its actions. We must stop fooling ourselves by selling and earning credits because in reality we have to go a very long way before the rising carbon emissions could be curtailed.

Image source: lamusa at Flickr under Creative Commons License.

As negotiations get under way in earnest at the two-week United Nations Climate Conference in Poland, recent surveys suggest a majority of people in both developing and industrialized nations seek substantive action on global warming and want their governments to agree on carbon emission targets.

The survey was commissioned by the HSBC Climate Partnership, a partnership of business and environmental groups. 12,000 people were surveyed in 12 countries and territories including Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, Mexico, the United Kingdom and the United States.

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The UN Climate Conference in Poznan, Poland, starting today is raising hopes and fears across the green spectrum. As reported in the Christian Science Monitor.

A year-long push to devise a new global climate-change treaty – one that picks up where the Kyoto Protocol leaves off – gets under way Monday in Poland, with delegates from more than 190 nations set to resume grappling with the thorny issues of how much more to cut greenhouse-gas emissions and who will pay.

The talks, in their first round, are focused on reducing human influence on climate from occurring, according to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). More or less, this means keeping global warming to about 2 degrees Celsius above pre industrial levels by the end of the century. Expectations however are low for this meeting.

President-Elect Obama’s pledge to reduce greenhouse gases to pre 1990 levels in the next 12 years notwithstanding, this group has a lot of challenges ahead. This first round of talks is primarily to develop working groups to tackle the various issues surrounding climate change in both developed and developing countries. But, with the global economic crisis on everyone’s mind, it will be hard to keep the conversation on track and work toward lower carbon emissions.

And while they are working to devise ways to reduce carbon emissions, they’ll create quite a few. AFP reports:

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At each meeting, US delegates historically demand that the convention abandon mandatory carbon emission caps and then make a big show of walking out of the convention when this doesn’t seem likely.

In Bali, it was starting to look like more of the same. With the US demanding that it be given weaker emissions targets than the other 186 countries at the table, time was running out and another stalemate looked likely. The scene was tense and in extreme frustration Yvo de Boer, UN Climate Chief, left the table in tears.

But finally the US felt the heat. Under intense pressure from the international community and US citizens themselves, the United States agreed to move ahead with the rest of the world.

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