Tag: UNFCCC

The EU has reacted coolly to speculation about a potential new direction in US climate policy during President Barack Obama’s second term.

SPECIAL REPORT / UN plans to double the world’s renewable energy capacity within two decades are under threat from fossil-fuel handouts, which have almost doubled in three years, campaigners say.

The EU will not commit to renew climate funding which runs out at the year's end ahead of talks at the Doha climate summit, which opens today (26 November). But new climate aid may be announced in the conference’s second week.  

The world will have to cut the rate of carbon emissions by an unprecedented rate to 2050 to stop global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius this century, a report released by PwC on Monday (5 November) showed.

The European Union and small island states criticised the United States on Tuesday (7 August) for backing away from a U.N. goal of limiting global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius.

Climate negotiators agreed a pact on Sunday (11 December) that would for the first time force all the biggest polluters to take action on greenhouse gas emissions, but critics said the action plan was not aggressive enough to slow the pace of global warming.

UN talks have run out of time to meet a December 2012 deadline to put in place a binding successor to the Kyoto Protocol on curbing greenhouse gases, the UN's top climate official said on Monday (6 June).

Eberhard Rhein argues that Copenhagen and Cancún-style UN climate conferences should be discontinued in favour of more regular meetings of the most polluting countries.

The first meeting to set up a climate aid programme which could disburse $100 billion a year to poor nations by 2020 looks likely to be derailed by a row over committee seats.

The UN climate change process "risks losing momentum and relevance" if the new round of negotiations that opened in Cancún yesterday (29 November) fails to make progress towards a new climate treaty, the EU's climate action commissioner has warned.

The Kyoto Protocol's Adaptation Fund could take on a wider role to manage money destined to help poor countries deal with the consequences of climate change, Farrukh Iqbal Khan, chair of the Adaptation Fund Board, told EurActiv in an interview. 

The slow pace of the international climate negotiations does not mean that there is no progress as large emerging countries are putting in place ambitious domestic climate legislation and businesses are increasingly looking to deploy clean technologies, Mark Kenber, deputy CEO of The Climate Group, told EurActiv in an interview.

Environment ministers are meeting today (14 October) in Luxembourg to set out the EU's strategy for the UN climate conference in Cancún at the end of the year. No decision is expected on whether to raise the bloc's CO2 emission target.

Countries' pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions offer virtually no chance of halting global warming before it reaches dangerous levels, researchers said as negotiators gather in Bonn to continue climate talks next week. 

As the latest round of talks draw to a close, outgoing UN climate chief Yvo de Boer warned of slow progress in the negotiations, leaving his successor with the daunting task of concluding a new global climate treaty in 2011. EurActiv reports from Bonn.

Debate on how to cut carbon dioxide emissions has been hotting up in Europe, in part due to the international community's failure to ink a successor deal to the Kyoto Protocol at the UNFCCC conferences in Copenhagen and Durban. But what are the options - and obstacles to a new pact?

The UN conference in Cancún next December needs to set the basis for a new climate change treaty in 2011, Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), told EurActiv in an exclusive interview.

Mexico, the host of the next high-level UN climate conference on climate change, is working to draw up objectives for the Cancún talks, which will continue the search for a new international climate agreement at the end of the year .

Much more initiative from the private sector will be required to take the UN climate negotiations forward after the weak Copenhagen Accord agreed in December, Mark Dominik, vice-president of Deutsche Bank Group, told EurActiv in an interview.

As world diplomats struggle to hammer out a climate agreement in Copenhagen, former senior EU negotiator on the Kyoto Protocol Jørgen Knud Henningsen told EurActiv in an interview that the debate on targets is ill-fated. He said leaders would be better off concentrating on the 1992 UN convention ratified by the US and devising policies to achieve the long-term goal of cutting C02 emissions by 80% before 2050. 

As international climate change negotiations drag on, EU countries are calling for a "rigorous assessment" of what other nations are prepared to do before scaling up their own commitments, EurActiv has learned.

Ahead of the next round of talks on a post-Kyoto climate agreement, the United Nations has released the first draft of a negotiating text stuffed with options for rich and poor countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which scientists blame for warming the planet.

Over 30 national proposals submitted to the UN in recent weeks have revealed that a significant divide must still be bridged between rich and poor countries if a new global climate agreement is to be concluded in December.

The world cannot afford to lock itself into a bad climate agreement for the next ten years, argues Anders Wijkman, a Swedish centre-right member of the European Parliament. Speaking to EurActiv in an interview, he said the UNFCCC should postpone agreeing a successor to the Kyoto Protocol should the preconditions for a good agreement not be met.