CLIMATE TALKS: STRONG CONCERNS IN N'DELTA OVER AGENDA BY RICH NATIONS

ENVIRONMENTAL rights advocacy groups in the Niger Delta, Nigeria's main oil and gas region, have joined Friends of the Earth International (FoEI) in expressing strong concerns over the stated agenda of the United States and a number of other developed countries at the forthcoming United Nations climate talks in Durban, South Africa, from November 28 to December 9.

Co-ordinator of the Centre for Environment, Human Rights and Development (CEHRD), Mr. Patrick Naagbanton, told AkanimoReports in Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital, yesterday that the global grassroots environmental federation is calling on other governments to stop these countries from undermining the globally-agreed framework for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and to ensure stronger targets for legally binding emissions cuts in line with science and equity.

The climate talks have been deadlocked since the beginning of the decade because of the failure of developed countries – those historically responsible for the bulk of the climate-changing emissions – to deliver on their moral and legal obligations for climate action.

AkanimoReports gathered that developed countries are obliged under the United Nations Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to cut their emissions first and fastest and to provide adequate public finance and technology transfer to developing countries.

But in the last two years the international negotiations have taken an even more worrying turn, with the US, Japan and others pushing to scrap the agreed, legally-binding framework for developed country emissions cuts and replace it with a voluntary ‘pledge and review' approach. This would put the world squarely on track to catastrophic global warming.

“Millions of people around the world are already facing the impacts of the climate crisis. Yet many developed country governments, who have it within their power to prevent the crisis from getting any worse, are acting with complete impunity. And worse, many are using the climate

talks to advance the narrow, profit-driven agenda of polluting industries, multinational corporations, and financial elites'', Sarah-Jayne Clifton, FoEI Co-ordinator of the Climate Justice and Energy Programme said in an on-line statement to our correspondent.

For Bobby Peek, Director of Friends of the Earth South Africa / groundWork, in his view said, ''to tackle the climate crisis we need a transformation in our unjust and unsustainable economies and their basis in dirty, polluting fossil fuels. In South Africa, it was the power of peoples’ struggle that defeated apartheid. Once again our communities need to organize, mobilise and help build not just a new South Africa but a new just and sustainable world that puts the interests and needs of ordinary people and communities first''.

Chairman of FoEI and Executive Director of Environmental Rights Action (ERA), Nnimmo Basey, has said, ''Durban could be where the greatest crime against humanity is committed. The blind greed and self-interest of developed countries could literally pass a death sentence on the peoples of Africa''.

Continuing, Bassey added, ''developed countries must take the lead by committing to urgent and dramatic legally-binding emissions cuts, stop the drive for destructive false solutions like carbon trading, and repay their climate debt to developing countries. Developing countries must resist the drive from the US, Japan and others towards climate catastrophe, and the European Union (EU) must prove its climate leadership or take its share of responsibility for what could be a disastrous outcome in Durban. The world cannot wait any longer''.

Our correspondent however, reports that the most fractious issue in the negotiations is the second phase of the Kyoto Protocol. Whilst the greenhouse gas emissions targets in the current phase are extremely weak and full of dangerous loopholes like carbon trading, the Protocol itself provides the only existing international framework for legally binding targets for developed countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

The first phase of emission cuts agreed under the Kyoto Protocol expires at the end of 2012. A second phase must be agreed in Durban to avoid gaps between the two periods.

Canada, Japan and Russia are determined not to commit to a second period of emission cuts under the Protocol unless all major economies – including China and the United States – agree to the same legal terms.

The US is reneging on its promise to take on comparable binding emissions reductions. Instead, it is pushing for a complete dismantling of the framework of legally-binding emissions reduction targets and for its replacement with a voluntary pledge and review system where countries would decide their own emissions cuts on a national basis.

According to United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the voluntary emissions reductions pledges submitted at the previous UN round of climate talks (COP 16 in Cancun) would put the world on track to a catastrophic 5 degrees of warming and even higher for Africa. ENDS