Page 13 - bne_newspaper_December_21_2018

Central Europe
December 21, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 13
Poland climate talks stumble to finish line to achieve deal
Wojciech Kosc in Katowice, Poland
Crucial negotiations on how to impede growth of global temperatures stumbled across the finish line in Katowice, Poland, on December 15, as nearly 200 governments agreed on a common set of rules to guide their climate policies.
Talks appeared on the edge of being derailed by Brazil over future carbon trading market rules,
but the Polish presidency of the COP ultimately brokered the final agreement. Despite all of its shortcomings, the agreed “Katowice Rulebook” is a step forward in tackling climate change and fairly solid premises to build upon in the coming years.
The UN-organised Katowice summit, known as the Conference of the Parties (COP), agreed in the first place on the way in which countries will table their climate action plans.
“[The Katowice Rulebook] sets out how countries will provide information about their domestic climate actions. This information includes mitiga- tion and adaptation measures as well as details of financial support for climate action in developing countries,” the UN’s Framework Convention on Cli- mate Change (UNFCCC), the summit’s organiser, said in a summary of the talks’ results.
Importantly, the rules apply across the developed and developing economies, which need to follow common rules of transparency so that they can be verified. That will also allow countries to hold each other to account on climate action.
Public access to national climate plans is
also hoped to drive their scrutiny and push governments to increase their ambitions. A lack of direct reference that ambition in climate action
should be raised is a major shortcoming of the talks, some observers say.
The issue of doing more to keep global warming at bay will return next year in September, at the UN’s special climate summit in New York. And then in December during the next COP in Santiago, Chile.
The Katowice COP also made progress in the ever delicate issue of climate finance. Countries pledged to continue contributions to multilateral funds such as the Green Climate Fund, and
also progressed towards the goal of mobilising $100bn per year from 2020 for climate action in developing economies.
In a story similar to many previous UN-organised climate summits, the gathering in the heart of the Polish coal country went 24 hours overtime, as diplomats haggled over details.
They had spent the previous two weeks in Katowice writing rules of how to implement the previous global climate change deal, the 2015 Paris Agreement. It was a political accord – general without operational details – that set a goal of keeping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100, relative to the pre-industrial era.
The target limit of temperature rise is rooted
in climate change science. Just before the Katowice summit kicked off, an October report by the UN’s key climate change scientific body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), sounded an alarm.
The IPCC said that even allowing the global temperatures to grow by 2 degrees Celsius by