Small steps to tackle climate change

At the meeting, delegates from around 200 countries agreed to set up a Green Climate Fund that would give $100 billion in aid to poor countries by 2020. They also outlined plans to protect the world’s rainforests and to share clean technology, allowing nations to develop low-carbon economies.
The summit also set a target of limiting an increase in average global temperatures to 2C above pre-Industrial times – the point beyond which climate change will have dangerous, lasting effects on the planet, say scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
But the two-week talks at the Mexican resort broke up without a binding agreement between countries on limiting global warming by cutting their greenhouse gas emissions.
There was also no resolution on how to extend the Kyoto Protocol, the climate treaty agreed in 1997 whose first-round targets expire in 2012.

Kyoto stalemate
Developing countries, such as China, want Kyoto to be extended, while many industrialised states want it to be replaced with a new comprehensive accord. The problem with Kyoto for industrialised countries, particularly the European Union, is that the protocol does not require developing nations to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. Kyoto’s targets apply to less than 40 of the world’s richest countries and it does not include China and the United States – the world’s two largest emitters.
When it was being negotiated back in the 1990s, developing countries were not big contributors to climate change. But since then many of them have had economic booms and their accompanying rapid social development has meant their carbon footprints are expanding fast.

Developing countries respond by saying richer nations – which have done most to cause climate change – should first be made to agree to drastic curbs in their own emissions.
Without an extension of the Kyoto Protocol, and in the absence of a binding international treaty on emissions cuts, there will not be the coordinated worldwide action plan necessary to tackle climate change, as countries will be left to voluntarily pledge to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. Existing pledges fall short of what is needed to keep the rise in average global temperatures below 2C: as they currently stand the planet will warm by over 3C, according to environmental consultancy Ecofys.
The failure to resolve the central issue of emissions has frustrated environmentalists and many businesses. Ahead of the Cancun conference, ClimateWise – an alliance of leading insurers, including Lloyd’s, on environmental issues – renewed its calls for a 40% emissions cut by 2020 over 1990 levels by rich nations, a substantial reduction relative to business as usual for large developing countries and an 85% global emissions reduction by 2050 over 2000 levels. These emissions cuts are crucial to ensure global temperatures do not rise to dangerous levels, it says.

Foundations to build on
The Cancun talks were successful in so far as a deal of sorts was hammered out there, even after round-the-clock talks. Following the acrimonious collapse of the Copenhagen summit last year, failure to agree any deal in Cancun would have left international climate change negotiations fatally deadlocked. 
 “You have broken that inertia (toward negativity) and have traded a feeling of collective failure for one that recovers hope in multilateralism,” Mexico’s President Calderón told delegates after they approved the deal.

“What we have now is a text that, while not perfect, is certainly a good basis for moving forward," chief US negotiator Todd Stern told BBC News.
China's top climate negotiator, Xie Zhenhua, said the Cancun accord proves the Kyoto Protocol is still alive. “At the South Africa conference, we'll undertake discussions and negotiations over the substantive content of the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol,” said Reuters News.
The Green Climate Fund builds on the Copenhagen accord, which pledged to channel funds to help the poorest countries to come to terms with global warming.  It will provide $30 billion in 2012 to help nations taking immediate action to halt the impacts of climate change, rising to $100 billion a year by 2020. 
The Cancun deal provides a signpost to the next climate conference in South Africa in 2011. The pressure is now on climate negotiators from countries around the world to agree a treaty in Durban that finally commits countries, large and small, rich and poor, to curb their emissions.

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