India urges deal on climate change solution by 2010

Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh on Sunday ruled out that India would compromise its stand on climate change and urged that the world reach a deal by 2010.

Ramesh told reporters at the Copenhagen climate change summit that the text of a political statement would be ready before Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and other world leaders reach Copenhagen for the final leg of the 12-day talks.

"I have clearly and categorically stated on behalf of the government of India that our Prime Minister is not coming here to negotiate the text," he said.

"India would not compromise on ‘teen murti’ (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Kyoto Protocol and Bali Action Plan)," said Ramesh ahead of Monday’s high-level segment which would see participation of environment ministers from across the globe.

"We must get an agreement in 2010," he said, adding that the text of the political statement should be ready by December 15.

Informal talks among world environment ministers on the draft deal, which has been criticised by rich and developing nations, continued over the weekend with the hope that they could agree on a text that could be put before the heads of state and government assembling for the plenary here later next week.

The highlight of the past week was an attempt by tiny Pacific Island nation Tuvalu to stall the negotiations by staging a walkout as the chair of the conference refused to take up its proposal for limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius from the pre-industrial years.

However, Danish Minister Connie Hedegaard, chairing the talks, insisted that procedural advances in the first six days had been "fantastic."

"The core discussions... have really started," she said adding the delegates "still have a daunting task in front of us over the next few days."

Ramesh, who is here to participate in the ministerial meet, has said India will play a constructive role in the climate negotiations but slammed efforts of rich nations to make domestic emission reduction claims by developing nations legally-binding and verifiable

Finally, America takes the lead on climate change

President Barack Obama's appearance at the U.N. climate change summit in Copenhagen this week will draw the spotlight. But one of the most important developments in the fight against global warming took place in Washington on Monday, when the Environmental Protection Agency ruled that greenhouse gases pose a danger to public health and the environment. This paves the way to regulate them.

With the ruling, the Obama administration sent a clear signal to Congress, to polluters, to climate-change deniers and to negotiators in Denmark trying to hammer out an agreement to replace the expiring Kyoto accord: After years of inaction, America is ready to lead.
Senators reacted quickly. They recognize that it's their job, not the EPA's, to figure out how to limit emissions of heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide and methane.
Democrat John Kerry, Independent Joe Lieberman and Republican Lindsey Graham offered more details of their tri-partisan plan to cut emissions by 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, with a long-term target of reducing them by 80 percent. Sens. Maria Cantwell and Susan Collins announced a competing proposal. The House passed its version in June.
Senate legislation isn't likely to be heard until spring, and both plans announced last week are too meek. But the discussion itself is what's important. Obama's leadership has led to renewed hope that the Denmark conference may produce tangible results, if not

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a binding international agreement, because U.S. intransigence has been a primary obstacle in the past. Some affectionately dub the gathering "Hopenhagen."
The controversy over the e-mails dubbed "Climategate" won't stall progress toward a global treaty that can be signed by the United States. Improper behavior by a group of researchers doesn't change the science, which is as clear about the Earth's warming as it is about gravity. Fifty years from now, this incident will be at most a footnote in what by then will be a history of rising seas.
The question for doubters to grapple with now is: What will be the consequences of inaction?
Economically, they could be dire. While the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and others claim regulation would be a job killer, it's increasingly apparent that green businesses will fuel the next boom. Their success will be necessary if the nation hopes to compete globally — let alone help to slow climate change.
Look at California. Its governments and businesses have been far ahead in fostering a green economy, and a study last week showed the results: From January 2007 to 2008, the number of green jobs in the state increased 5 percent, while the overall number of jobs declined 1 percent.
But economics are a minor concern compared with what worries the people of countries like Tuvalu, located halfway between Hawaii and Australia. If temperatures don't stop rising, the entire island could be under water by the end of the century.
That reality is finally leading to action, in Copenhagen and in Washington.

Major emitters must join climate pact: Australia

Australia fears rising temperatures will trigger more intense bushfires and greater extremes of droughts and floods, threatening crops and livelihoods. It says all major greenhouse gas emitters should sign up to legally binding steps to reduce emissions.
"This is one of those situations where we're all in it," Australian Climate Change Minister Penny Wong told Reuters in an interview.
Draft U.N. climate text at climate talks in Copenhagen says the world should halve emissions by 2050, with rich nations making the largest portion of cuts.
The text only mentions that big developing nation emitters should take aspirational steps to curb the output of planet-warming gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels, language many rich nations say is unacceptable.
"That text is a reflection of where negotiators have got to but it's a long way from what we need and a long way from what we need to be working with," Wong said.
Australia, among the world's highest per-capita carbon emitters, says it will offer cash to help the developing world cope with climate change. It plans to cut its greenhouse gas emissions between 5 and 25 percent below 2000 levels by 2020.
Negotiators from nearly 200 countries are meeting in Copenhagen during Dec 7-18 talks to try to finalize what hosts Denmark hopes will be a political agreement that ramps up the fight against climate warming.
More than 110 world leaders descend on Copenhagen next week to attend a summit to try to clinch a deal on deeper emissions cuts by rich nations, steps by developing nations their carbon pollution and finance to help the poor adapt to climate change.
The United Nations has said a full, legal treaty to expand or replace the existing Kyoto Protocol is out of reach at the talks after two years of troubled negotiations and is likely to be agreed some time in 2010.
Wong said it was crucial ministers and world leaders give the talks a stronger focus and that it was time to overcome the entrenched positions of a few people.
"Fundamentally what we need now is political ownership of these negotiations. This can no longer be about just one or two people putting a particular position that they've put for the past two years."
Host Denmark has given Australia a special role at the talks to try to help get an agreement.
"My view is very much that we need the key issues that are beyond agreement, beyond the possibility of agreement at the official level, being elevated to ministers and then to leaders.
She said agreeing on a global deal to limit the average rise in global temperatures to 2 degree Celsius needed participation from all major emitters.
"We're not going to get that unless we're able to expand the circle, expand the number of countries who are prepared to put actions on the table, who are prepared to come into an international arrangement."

ADB chief says climate finance insufficient

ADB President Haruhiko Kuroda also told Reuters in an interview that if governments were to fail to reach a climate deal in Copenhagen, it could lead to a collapse of the carbon market which would hit efforts to deal with climate change.
Rich and poor nations differ over how much the developed world should pay to help developing economies combat or cope with climate change.
"Whatever is agreed in this process, financing is really key -- financing for mitigation as well as adaptation efforts to be done particularly by developing countries," Kuroda said during a one-day break in 190-nation negotiations in the Danish capital.
"If meaningful financing arrangements are agreed, that would facilitate the core agreement on greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets, threshold or benchmark by the international community, which would be absolutely necessary to stabilize climate change at the latest by 2015," he said.
Kuroda said many different figures had been mentioned of the need for financing for a climate deal ranging anywhere from $10 billion to $100 billion.
"At this stage the figures committed by the developed world are still insufficient and must be substantially increased over the years to come," Kuroda said, but did not give a figure for how high it needed to rise.
The bank's Japanese president said that the European Union's pledge of 7.3 billion euros over three years was "a significant first" toward a global financing deal.
ADAPTATION MONEY
Financing is needed, he said, especially for developing countries' adaptation measures which are not so "automatically financed" as mitigation efforts which benefit from funds generated by the cap-and-trade system.
Mitigation means curbing greenhouse gas emissions while adaptation comprises efforts to cope with climate change by widely ranging means from flood defenses to development of drought-resistant crops and disease control.
"Some Asian countries are going to be disproportionately affected by climate change," he said, mentioning Bangladesh, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia and Pacific islands as vulnerable to sea rises, typhoons, cyclones and other weather phenomena.
"Many of them are low-income countries, and the adaptation costs are huge," he said. "So the international community must provide adequate support for those severely affected and low-income countries."
Kuroda said it was the role of the multilateral development banks, including his Manila-headquartered ADB, to assist governments in the process, though the banks are not directly involved in the Copenhagen negotiations. Kuroda said failure by governments to reach a new accord on climate measures extending beyond the Kyoto Protocol period ending in 2012 could have grave repercussions.
"If there is no agreement post-Kyoto, then the carbon market would collapse," he said. "That would cause great damage to the global effort to reduce effort to reduce GHG emissions

Indian farmers adapt to shifting weather patterns

For decades, people of Uttar Pradesh, whose population is more than half that of the United States, have been witnessing erratic weather, including increasingly intense rainfall over short periods of time.
The rain, combined with heavy mountain run-off from nearby Nepal, which is also seeing heavier-than-usual rains, has inundated villages, towns and cities in the region.
Such floods have destroyed homes, crops and livestock, highlighting the fact that the poorest in countries such as China and India are most at risk from climate change.
While world leaders in Copenhagen argue over who should cut carbon emissions and who should pay, experts say low-cost adaptation methods, partly based on existing community knowledge, could be used to help vulnerable farmers.
In the fields of Manoharchak village, where terms such as "global warming" are unknown, such experiments are bearing fruit, changing the lives of poor farmers who outsmart nature using simple but effective techniques to deal with rising climate variability.
"For the last three years, we have been trying to change our ways to cope with the changing weather," said Hooblal Chauhan, a farmer whose efforts have included diversifying production from wheat and rice to incorporate a wide variety of vegetables.
"I don't know what those big people in foreign countries can do about the weather, but we are doing what we can to help ourselves," said the 55-year-old from Manoharchak, situated 90 km (55 miles) north of the bustling city of Gorakhpur.
IMPROVISATION
Villagers here have raised the level of their roads, built homes with foundations up to 10 feet above ground, elevated community handpumps and created new drainage channels.
Supported by the Gorakhpur Environmental Action Group -- a research and advocacy group -- farmers are also planting more flood-tolerant rice, giving them two harvests a year where they once had one, and diversifying from traditional crops to vegetables such as peas, spinach, tomatoes, onions and potatoes.
The diversity of crops, they say, is particularly beneficial when their wheat and rice fail. And the vegetables give them not only a more varied and nutritional diet, but also help in earning an income when excesses are sold.
Increasingly, intense rain means farmers in the region also have to contend with silt deposition from long periods of water-logging in their farms.
But 50-year-old widow Sumitra Chauhan, who grows about 15 different vegetables as well as rice and wheat on her two-acre plot, says she has learned ways to overcome the problem.
"We plant our (vegetable) seedlings in the nurseries and then when the water drains, we transfer them to the land so there are no delays," she said, standing in her lush green plot packed with vegetables including mustard, peas, spinach and tomatoes.
CLIMATE REFUGEES
Farmers have also started using "multi-tier cropping" where vegetables like bottle gourd and bitter gourd are grown on platforms raised about 5-6 feet above the ground and supported by a bamboo frame.
Once the water-logged soil drains, farmers can plant the ground beneath the platforms with vegetables and herbs such as spinach, radish and coriander.
Warmer temperatures and an unusual lack of rain during monsoon periods in eastern Uttar Pradesh have also led to dry spells. To cope, villagers have contributed to buying water pumps for irrigation, lowering their dependence on rain.
According to Oxfam, which is supporting the action group's work in Uttar Pradesh, millions of people in India have been affected by climate-related problems.
Some have been forced into debt. Others have migrated to towns and cities to search for manual labor or have had to sell assets such as livestock to cope.
"It is true that developing countries need a lot of investment to adapt to the effects of climate change, but small and marginal farmers, who are some of India's poorest, can make a start by using simple, cheap techniques to help themselves," said Ekta Bartarya of the Gorakhpur Environmental Action Group.

Environment ministers try to unlock climate deal

Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, highlighting a spat between top greenhouse gas emitters China and the United States, said he hoped all nations would seek to raise their offers in the talks.
"China is calling on the United States to do more. The United States is calling on China to do more. I hope that in the coming days everyone will call on everyone to do more," he said.
The ministers were holding informal talks during a one-day break in the December 7-18 meeting involving 190 nations, which will culminate in a summit of world leaders on Thursday and Friday including U.S. President Barack Obama.
"There are still many challenges. There are still many unsolved problems," Danish Minister Connie Hedegaard told reporters. "But as ministers start to arrive there is also the political will."
The talks bring together representatives from rich and poor nations who have been arguing over who is responsible for emissions cuts, how deep they should be, and who should stump up cash to pay for them.
Countries like China and India say the industrialized world must make sharper reductions in greenhouse gas output and provide the poor with more cash to fund a shift to greener growth and adapt to a warmer world.
"An agreement is certainly possible. If all of us trust each other and if we have the courage and conviction, we can still come to a fair, equitable deal in Copenhagen," Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said, heading into Sunday's sessions.
Richer countries say the developing world's carbon emissions are growing so fast they must sign up for curbs to prevent dangerous levels of warming.
China has said it wants to wrap up a firm deal before Premier Wen Jiabao joins other world leaders at the summit.
"My understanding is that the leaders are coming to celebrate the good outcome of the talks," senior Chinese envoy Su Wei said on Saturday.
DEMONSTRATORS RELEASED
On Sunday, South African Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu handed over to the U.N.'s de Boer tens of thousands of signatures from around the world calling for climate action.
An afternoon church service was also planned at Copenhagen's Cathedral, with a sermon by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and attended by Danish royalty, followed by a "bell ringing for the climate" in churches around the world.
Police have released all but 13 of nearly 1,000 people detained after a march on Saturday, a police spokesman said.
The march by tens of thousands of people was largely peaceful but violence erupted toward evening when demonstrators smashed windows and set fire to cars.
Some of those detained said they were unfairly held and badly treated by police.
"They arrested us for no reason. We were all peaceful," said Hana Nelson, aged 24, a student from Halifax, Canada, who was released without charges

Climate talks to go closed doors, or over dinner

If a climate deal is to be done, it is more likely to be thrashed out over coffee in the corridor, a glass of wine at dinner or a stroll along Copenhagen's cobbled downtown streets than in the vast conference hall.
Personal chemistry and friendships among opposing delegates are critical in complex negotiations, and could be particularly crucial this weekend when ministers from key countries try to break through the deadlocks in talks on a global accord to control greenhouse gases responsible for climate change.
The ministers were coming earlier than planned to prepare the ground for a summit of 110 leaders at the end of the week. The aim is to tie up a political deal laying the outlines of a new climate change pact that will be finished next year.
The Copenhagen conference caps two years of negotiations among 192 countries. They have convened for formal talks nearly a dozen times, usually getting nowhere. But their leaders or top negotiators have met even more often in informal settings — touring a South African wildlife park, walking on an Argentinian glacier or relaxing near the fjords of Greenland.
Those weeks of relaxed conversations, discussions of families and hobbies alongside climate issues and public policy, swapping suits for jeans, are invaluable in building relationships and trust that can translate in the future into diplomatic breakthroughs.
Two of the bitterest foes in the negotiations, U.S. special envoy Todd Stern and Chinese negotiator Xie Zhenhua are known to meet regularly and cordially, even though they communicate through an interpreter.
"He's a very personable guy," Barbara Finamore, China program director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, says of Xie. She says the two men have an understanding that goes deeper than their public positions.
The Copenhagen conference, like all U.N. climate talks before, are conducted on many levels, from the open assemblies attended by all nations to small rooms where a few delegates haggle in quiet.
Public negotiating sessions often are contentious rounds of finger-pointing couched in diplomatic niceties. Poor countries say they will be the first to suffer from global warming caused by the rich industrial world. Wealthy nations say developing countries are not doing enough to help solve the problem.
The nations are grouped in various alliances with common interests, the largest known as the G-77 plus China which actually is comprised of some 135 countries. The G-77 is joined by the European Union, the Small Island States, the Least Developed Countries and the Umbrella Group, which lumps the United States with Australia, Canada and Japan.
It's a convenient way to save time and repetition, with an appointed spokesman stating an agreed position at the opening or closing of a plenary.
The plenary sessions are not for negotiation. It's where nations stake out positions, posture for their home constituency and show allegiance to their allies. Delegates say most of the progress is hammered out behind the scenes.
"The more intimate the setting, the easier it is to talk," said Jurgen Lefevere, a veteran European climate negotiator. "It's amazing how much depends on who bumps into who in the corridor."
Plenary sessions break up into smaller "contact groups" to deal with specific issues. When talks bog down, the chairman may assign a "friend of the chair" to pull the key players into a side room and thrash it out. If that fails, the problem will be put aside for later. If it's a major issue, it will wait be passed up to the ministers or heads of government.
The formal and informal streams reinforce each other, Lefevere said.
In smaller groups negotiators can probe, parry and question. They explore how far the other side can relent and where the threshold of pain is, said Lefevere, a Belgian diplomat representing the European Commission.
One-on-one contact can be over coffee at the conference center or over a glass of wine and a good dinner.
This is when delegates exchange hard information or privately swap internal documents and proposals, Lefevere said. "You get the nuances and subtleties that you can't convey in a big meeting."
But even with friends, he said, "you have to be careful how to show the bottom line."