Bangkok meeting to draft Copenhagen climate agreement
Updated
Negotiators are in Bangkok this week to pull together draft climate change agreements, ahead of the peak meeting in Copenhagen later this year - and floods in the Philippines are being seen as a sign of dangers ahead.
Presenter: Sen Lam; Claudette Werden
Speakers: Kim Carstensen, director of the Global Climate Initiative; Yvo De Boer, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change; Nick Rowley, climate advisor to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair; Josh Carmody, Asian Development Bank's climate change spokesman
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WERDEN: Despite plenty of political rhetoric, the last few years of climate change negotiations have been bogged down by an unwillingness of many countries, including the world's big polluters, to commit to firm emissions targets . And there've also been problems clarifying just how much financial help will be needed from richer countries to help poor countries make their economies cleaner and greener, without slowing development. But the United Nations Climate Change Chief Yvo de Boer warns time is running out.
DE BOER: The negotiating agenda for the Copenhagen process makes it very clear that developing country action to limit the growth of their emissions depends on financial support being made available, so without financial support there's not going to be an agreement in Copenhagen.
WERDEN: The Asian Development Bank's climate change spokesman Josh Carmody says the scale of investment required to make developing countries greener is beyond the means of governments to raise through taxation. He believes public funding would be better spent in leveraging private investment in clean energy initiatives.
CARMODY: It's all about moving private money particularly into India and China because the public sources of money, there's just not enough money, government's have been belted around the head with the global financial crisis and they cannot cough up huge amounts of money, they'll put something on the table. It's not about caps and targets as an end to itself, it's around caps and targest to create demand that makes investment into these countries profitable and if it becomes profitable you'll get a stampede of these pension funds running, just like 15 years ago no one would invest in a toll road from a private perspective. Toll roads are a little bit on the nose now. Essentially Macquarie Bank made it a valuable investment proposition to invest in toll roads and every pension fund in the world all of a sudden wanted a toll road. We essentially need to create the same mechanism in investing in low carbon infrastructure in emerging countries and that's what will get us to avoid dangerous climate change and we need governments to help in setting up the structures and create the price signals and possibly come up with some mechanisms to possible derisk some of these investments.
WERDEN: Nick Rowley, the climate advisor to Britain's former Prime Minister Tony Blair, says the physical reality of extreme weather conditions including droughts and floods is pushing developing countries towards accepting a climate change deal
ROWLEY: One of the reasons why I think there is a greater level of engagement amongst developing economies is that they really do realise the extent to which they're already exposed to the climate effects of a warming world so that's the first thing which is they're actually not too concerned about what might be happening in the coming twenty or thirty years, they're actually starting to feel the effects today. That's certainly true for China and it's true for other countries in the region as well, that's the first point. The second point is when you have major global economies making decisions about the rules that are going to apply globally in relation to the problem, then there is a dynamic whereby some of the large economies and some of the rapidly developing economies within this region actually want to be part of helping shape what those rules are, so they can understand them firstly but also to ensure those rules are to their benefit.
WERDEN: Mr Rowley who now advises both business and government on greenhouse emission reduction says at its heart, the global climate problem is a question around human development, the challenge of creating economic growth with less carbon growth. But the UN's Climate Change Chief Yvo de Boer says wealthy countries won't open their chequebooks unless developing countries agree to caps, or clear limits, on overall emissions - a move resisted so far by emerging economies like India and China.
BOER: Without caps on emissions, it's going to be difficult for rich countries to mobilise financial resources, so really the financing and the emissions reduction issues are very intimately linked.
