Earth from space

Saturday 10th November, Marrakech: At the close of COP7, the latest negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement aimed at preventing dangerous climate change, Greenpeace today described the outcome as a hard won battle for a token outcome.

"Governments may be congratulating themselves now, but what have they really achieved? As climate change bites harder, leaders of the future will look back on the Marrakech meeting as a lost opportunity and realise that the participants of COP7 should have done more to tackle climate change," said Bill Hare, Greenpeace climate policy director.

"But the Kyoto Protocol is just a small start in what must be an ongoing and ever increasing commitment to reduce greenhouse gases globally. Now that the architecture of the Protocol is in place, parties have no excuse to delay ratifying and implementing it.

"The Kyoto Protocol is the key to preventing dangerous climate change. The door has only just been unlocked. Now we have to fling it wide open."

The Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was initially designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from industrialised countries by 5%. By the end of the Bonn negotiations last July, the effectiveness of the Protocol had already been substantially weakened. Emission reductions in the order of 80% are needed if dangerous climate change is to be prevented.

"We still have a long, long way to go. This is just the beginning," said Hare.

After two weeks of negotiations, the fine details of the implementation of the Protocol have been ironed out - but there are still many problems. These include:

• Russia has been allowed about a 100% increase on its already generous forest management sinks allowance, from 17 Megatonnes to 33 Megatonnes of carbon per year.
• A lost opportunity to contribute concrete recommendations on how to tackle climate change at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (Rio +10) in Johannesberg in September 2002 by, for example, calling for a major program of renewable energy to bring electricity to the 2 billion people of the world who currently do not have access to electricity.
• Failure to concretely stop the banking of forest and other land use sink credits, which will lead to higher fossil fuel emissions in the future.
• Failure to ensure that the eligibility to take part in the trading system is tied to properly reporting on forest activities used for sink credits.

However there have been some minor environmental victories during the past two weeks of negotiations. These include:

• New provisions for public participation in the Clean Development Mechanism that will help the public monitor and have input into proposed CDM projects.
• Enforceable rules that ensure that countries must adhere to a set of rules on reporting, monitoring and verification of emissions before being able to use the Kyoto mechanisms: emissions trading, Joint Implementation and the Clean Development Mechanism.
• Ensuring that it is possible to geographically locate and verify areas of land claimed for sink credits.
• Quality control standards for reporting on sink credits.
  

climate change desert

Governments at international climate negotiations underway in Morocco are being asked today to support an ambitious project to help tackle poverty and fight climate change, by providing renewable energy to more than two billion people globally.

The United Nations General Assembly has invited participants in the latest round of the Kyoto Protocol negotiations to make recommendations to the World Sustainable Summit on Development (WSSD) - the 10th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit. It was at the Rio summit where the Climate Convention, which gave rise to the Kyoto Protocol, was adopted. The Convention's objective is to prevent dangerous climate change, which requires over 80% reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions.

Today delegates will begin the process of deciding what climate protection measures to recommend to the WSSD.

Climate Action Network, a global coalition of more than 200 environmental non-government organistions including Greenpeace, is urging countries to use the opportunity the UN has provided them to support the massive expansion of renewable energy globally.

"Two billion people around the world - one in three of us - have no access to reliable sources of energy to meet the basic needs of life such as cooking, clean water, lighting, or power for health centres and schools," said Greenpeace campaigner Paul Horsman.

"This is as unacceptable as it is intolerable - we can and must provide sustainable energy sources to provide for these basic needs."

"The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that developing countries are most threatened by climate change - water supplies, agriculture and health are all threatened. Much of this threat can be avoided with a massive and committed global expansion of renewable energy supplies, which at the same time will help prevent dangerous climate change."

Greenpeace and international retail chain The Body Shop launched the Choose Positive Energy campaign in June this year aimed at providing renewable energy to two billion people by 2012.

"It's not just environment groups that want to see this," said Horsman. "The G8 Task Force has called for an expansion of renewable energy to assist in mitigating climate change and air pollution, alleviating poverty and increasing quality of life, especially in developing countries."

"The only barriers to massive uptake and expansion of renewable energy are financial and political - not technological. In many cases the life-cycle costs of renewable energy technologies are already competitive with conventional energy technologies.

Renewable energy is able to supply developing countries with energy security, andallow for public participation from local communities including indigenous peoples, freeing them from dependence on imported polluting fossil fuels.