![]() He was once the US’s chief negotiator on the Montreal Protocol, which began the process of saving the world from the menace of CFCs and began the UN on the task of mending the hole in the ozone layer. So what does it all mean? One man with more perspective than most was Richard Benedick. There was no pledge for a 20% reduction of carbon dioxide emissions by 2005 that Aosis had proposed. ![]() But there was none of the firm commitments that the hard line greens wanted, or the climate scientists recommended. The Berlin Mandate talks of reductions in greenhouse gases, targets needing to be considered, and timetables worked out. In the end the “R” and the “T” words were in the final text. A similar length of time and many hours sleep were lost worrying about the two “T” words – targets and timetables. It took a week to decide whether the word “reductions” could or could not be included hundreds of hours were expended by people in corridors trying to persuade them yes, it could be, or no, it could not. What the argument was about was chiefly what was known in Berlin jargon as the “R” word – reductions. ![]() Photograph: Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy German Federal environment minister Angela Merkel at the UN Climate Change Conference in Berlin, 1995. On the last day, when diplomats and ministers from more than 130 countries and lobbyists from more than 500 disparate groups grasped the final document in their hands, the views on what it all meant were as diverse as ever. Jokes from the fossil fuel lobby that if these dire predictions prove right and some nations sink beneath the waves it will alter the voting pattern in their favour, did not improve the tone nor the temper of the delegates. The lumbering negotiation process would yield too little too late to stop the worst effects of climate change. They thought the mandate was not enough: the vested interests of the industrialised world had left them facing extinction as nations by the middle of the next century. If that sounds like hyperbole, then you did not hear the anguished statements from the 32 members of the Alliance of Small Island States (Aosis). Not that there was a lack of passion at the conference at least millions and probably billions will live or die as a result of the action which will follow the Berlin Mandate, as the final document that emerged is to be called. News editors the world over yawned last week when history was being made at the World Climate Conference in Berlin – and it is not surprising: tedious 6am wrangling over words in square brackets grips readers less than murderers facing the electric chair. No funeral in Berlin: targets and timetables at the World Climate Conference This has been resisted by the powerful and well-organised international fossil-fuel lobby, which had seemed to have persuaded the US not to concede. The final document is a fudge, but for the first time it clears a way for hard worldwide negotiations on targets for reducing CO2 emissions. The 118 countries attending the Berlin conference on climate change have given themselves two years to agree on future reduction targets and timetables for implementing them when the present agreements to stabilise emissions run out in the year 2000.Īosis, the Alliance of Small Island States, whose 32 members fear that they will disappear beneath rising seas if urgent action is not taken, was disappointed with the deal, but European countries were delighted that a diplomatic disaster had been avoided. Read more Way open for cuts in greenhouse gasesĬoncessions by the United States and oil-exporting countries have led to a breakthrough on a United Nations mandate demanding a reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions by industrialised countries.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |