Switzerland says it is satisfied with the global climate deal finally agreed early on Sunday, which will for the first time force all big polluters to take action on emissions.
According to the resolution – negotiated over the past two weeks in Durban, South Africa – countries will no longer be split into industrialised and developing nations.
““Thanks to this paradigm change, it was possible to achieve significant progress at the international climate negotiations,” Swiss negotiator and environment office director Bruno Oberle said.
The package of accords extends the Kyoto Protocol, the only global pact that enforces carbon cuts. Newly agreed is the format of the Green Climate Fund to help poor countries tackle climate change and maps out a path to a legally binding agreement on emissions reductions.
Delegates in Durban agreed to start work next year on a new legally binding treaty to cut greenhouse gases to be decided by 2015 and to come into force by 2020.
The process for doing so, called the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action, would „develop a new protocol, another legal instrument or agreed outcome with legal force“ that would be applicable under the United Nations climate convention.
That phrasing, agreed at a last-ditch huddle in the conference centre between the European Union, India, China and the United States, was used by all parties to claim victory.
Concessions
It also enabled Switzerland to leave Durban satisfied. “With the concessions agreed to by the newly industrialised countries and the US, the conditions stipulated by the EU, New Zealand, Australia and Switzerland for a new commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol were fulfilled,” the Swiss environment office said in a statement. “It will now be possible to continue the Kyoto Protocol from 2013 without any gaps in its implementation.”
The Swiss delegation said the Green Climate Fund will be used to support developing countries in the implementation of mitigation and adaptation measures.
The Swiss added that a new instrument for dealing with the challenges facing agriculture as a result of climate change was also created, and a process for the reduction of deforestation was also defined. Deforestation contributes to at least one fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Small island states
But many small island states and developing nations at risk of being swamped by rising sea levels and extreme weather said the deal marked the lowest common denominator possible and lacked the ambition needed to ensure their survival.
UN climate chief Christiana Figueres acknowledged the final wording on the legal form of a future deal was ambiguous: „What that means has yet to be decided.“
A UN spokesman said the final texts might not all be publicly available for some days.
Environmentalists said governments wasted valuable time by focusing on a handful of specific words in the negotiating text, and failed to raise emissions cuts to a level high enough to reduce global warming.
UN reports released in the last month warned delays on a global agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions will make it harder to keep the average rise to within two degrees Celsius over the next century.
But agreement on the package avoided a collapse of the talks – that had been due to end on Friday – and spared the blushes of host South Africa, whose stewardship of the two weeks of often fractious negotiations came under fire from rich and poor nations.
„We came here with plan A, and we have concluded this meeting with plan A to save one planet for the future of our children and our grandchildren to come,“ said South African Foreign Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, who chaired the talks.
„We have made history,“ she said, bringing the hammer down on the Durban conference, the longest in two decades of UN climate negotiations.
New figures from the UN’s World Meteorological Organization on November 21 showed that the three biggest greenhouse gases not only reached record levels in 2010 but were increasing at an ever-faster rate, despite efforts by many countries to reduce emissions.
The WMO found that total carbon dioxide levels in 2010 hit 389 parts per million, up from 280 parts per million in 1750, before the start of the Industrial Revolution.
Levels increased 1.5 ppm per year in the 1990s and 2.0 per year in the first decade of this century, and are now rising at a rate of 2.3 per year. The top two other greenhouse gases – methane and nitrous oxide – also are soaring.
The WMO cited fossil fuel-burning, loss of forests that absorb CO2 and use of fertiliser as the main culprits.
The findings were consistent with November figures from the US Department of Energy that global carbon dioxide emissions in 2010 jumped by the highest one-year amount ever.
On November 18, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report into extreme weather linked to human-induced climate change. It said an increase in heat waves was almost certain (99-100%), while heavier rainfall, more floods, stronger cyclones, landslides and more intense droughts were likely (66-100%) across the globe this century as the Earth’s climate warms.
Sceptics have questioned the models the IPCC uses to make its climate predictions.