Sergio Abranches

Last week, China’s National Development and Reform Commission reportedly directed seven regions to set overall emissions control targets and submit proposals for how caps should be allocated. The directive, which encompasses the cities of Beijing, Chongqing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Tianjin and the provinces of Guangdong and Hubei, aims to establish cap-and-trade pilot projects for the country’s carbon market, meant to be in place by 2015.

The Chinese government had signaled at the COP17 climate negotiations in South Africa last December that it could adopt a more ambitious emissions reduction policy by 2015 and 2020. As part of the Copenhagen Accord, it had already committed to reducing carbon emissions intensity by 40-45 percent between 2005 and 2020.

That (albeit non-binding) commitment is reflected in the nation’s 2011-2015 five-year plan, which sets a 16-17 percent reduction target for carbon intensity.

China has never committed globally to actions that were not already a part of its ongoing domestic policies. The carbon intensity targets pledged under the Copenhagen Accord were decided internally way before Prime Minister Wen Jiabao closed a deal with the United States and other countries in Copenhagen in 2009. Now, China is poised to implement a new stage of its emissions reduction policies with fixed emissions caps.

Chinese leaders are apparently more willing to sign multilateral agreements, provided they are not a constraint on domestic policies. The way to do that is to use the Chinese planning structure to their advantage. By formulating the future stages of their policies ahead of the international agenda of negotiations, especially in the environmental realm, Chinese leaders can shift from a veto position towards a cooperative one, while maintaining complete sovereignty over domestic decision-making.

China has plenty of reasons of its own to reduce pollution, resource use and greenhouse gas emissions. It needs no outside push. The impact of land, air and water pollution on public health and well-being justifies the adoption of a more ambitious environment and climate policy. The major problem is, and will continue to be, how to balance the goals of cutting pollution and boosting efficiency with economic growth.

Carbon intensity targets pose no constraints at all on growth. Emissions can still increase while intensity decreases. China is implementing the world’s most ambitious renewable energy program, with very aggressive targets. Although solar and wind power generation are growing at staggering rates, the use of fossil fuels, particularly coal, have also increased.

This means that while China’s green energy sector is becoming very significant, its grey energy sector remains an enormous one and keeps growing, though at falling rates. The difference is that in the new Chinese policy guidelines, the gray energy sector comes with a negative sign for growth, and the green energy sector comes with a positive one. Each new plan aims at further reducing the gray sector, and increasing the green one.

The caveat is, again, the scale here. Even with downward movement at each new five-year plan, the Chinese gray economy will remain huge for decades to come. Carbon emissions associated with fossil fuel use will be on the rise well into the 2020s if not the 2030s.

Emissions caps are no guarantee that emissions will decrease faster. The experience with cap and trade systems shows they require additional measures for emissions to fall significantly. The good news is that China is also investing more in efficiency and quality improvement. Increasing the efficiency of clean energy along with energy-saving technologies can shift the economy toward more efficient patterns of energy and resource use, accelerating emissions reductions.

The best of all news is that China is abandoning the policy of growth without environmental constraints that led to the vast pollution and resource scarcity problems the country now faces. Chinese plans still aim at rates of growth far above the world average, but at the same time  they are adopting progressively greater constraints on the use of resources and fossil fuels.

(Post previously posted at National Geographic’s The Great Energy Challenge Blog)

Sergio Abranches

Brazilian state-owned financial institutions will finance research and development of cellulosic ethanol, reports the Brazilian daily newspaper Valor Econômico.

The National Development Bank, BNDES  and FINEP, the science and technology finance agency, will offer about R$ 1,1 billion (US$ 600 million) this year in subsidized loans, grants in aid and equity sharing to companies to develop pilot projects of cellulosic ethanol. There are already 14 business plans under consideration by the two financial agencies.

Brazil has a highly competitive sugarcane ethanol industry, but research on second generation biofuels has lagged behind. Ethanol companies are also facing mounting problems on their supply chain with falling productivity of sugarcane plantations. Extreme climate events have led to recurring harvest losses over the last years. Aging plantations have lower and falling productivity levels. There has been very little investment on plantation renewal over the last five years. Once a net exporter, Brazil has become a large ethanol importer. In 2011, the country imported about 1.1 billion liters of ethanol, mainly from the US, and this year estimates are it will have to import 1.7 to 2.0 billion liters. As crop yields will be around 10% lower in 2012 (they’ve been falling over the last four harvests) Brazil could end up by importing as much ethanol as it exports.

Second generation biofuels will allow greater production without competing with food crops. Brazilian cellulosic ethanol would help to increase production and productivity without demanding new areas for plantation. Brazil has at least two excellent sources for cellulosic ethanol: sugar cane straw, today burnt on the fields and doing severe harm to workers’ health and the environment, and eucalyptus offshoots left on the plantations’ sites after logging. Both have high cellulose content. Cellulosic ethanol production could increase ethanol production by at least 50% using straw and bagasse from existing sugarcane crops. Other agricultural leftovers and residues could also be used productively for cellulosic ethanol production further boosting the volume generated without increasing crop area. This would reduce the need for sugarcane plantations to expand over areas dedicated to other crops, thus becoming an indirect driver for deforestation and food insecurity.

The National Development Bank has also budgeted about R$ 2 billion (US$ 1.1 billion) to finance new biochemical products from sugarcane, and gasification of sugarcane bagasse to generate biofuels and plastics.

It is a good start, although investment on the development of second generation biofuels will demand far greater sums. The Brazilian government and biofuel companies have been neglecting R&D for second generation biofuels. The country is still under the risk of losing competitiveness and leadership on the future global biofuels markets. Brazilian competitive advantages on crop-based biofuel production comes more from the greater efficiency  of sugarcane’s photosynthesis, than from ethanol companies’ technical and managerial virtues. Now, the country will have public policies, public finance, and corporate programs supporting the development of second generation biofuel technology.

Sergio Abranches

Why the Durban Platform is a political breakthrough, but a dismal outcome in the light of climate science?

The second part of the question is far easier to answer. Negotiators in Durban have agreed to review the pledges for emissions reductions in the second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol and Cancun Agreement by 2015 in the light of the fifth assessment report on the state of science, to be released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change from September 2013. However, as the IPCC said on a press statement about COP17, “in its fourth assessment report published in 2007, the IPCC showed that a temperature increase of 2 degrees Celsius could have a damaging effect on water supplies, biodiversity, food supplies, coastal flooding and storms and health.”

Additionally, the IPCC also states that:

“The fourth assessment report shows that emissions of the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming must fall by 2050 by 50-85% globally compared to the emissions of the year 2000, and that global emissions must peak well before the year 2020, with a substantial decline after that, in order to limit the growth in global average temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.”

From the standpoint of science Durban has decided on too little too late.

In the political realm, though, COP17 was a watershed. First of all, it closes a whole chapter of negotiations on commitment periods under the Kyoto Protocol. There will be only a second one, with fewer ratifiers than the first. COP18 will still have to decide whether it will end by 2017 or 2020. There has been no consensus on the end date, and the alternatives ended up within brackets. But the main point has been resolved: it will be replaced by a new “protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force under the Convention applicable to all Parties”, no later than 2020. That’s the core decision contained in the Durban Platform.

The above expression is a political breakthrough, one that has been progressively taking shape since COP15, in Copenhagen. There, for the first time ever, the United States and the BASIC countries (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) have agreed to offer quantified pledges for emission reductions under the United Nations Climate Convention (UNFCCC). They were voluntary, not legally binding, but they have been formally registered with UNFCCC”s Executive Secretariat. It was a major first step and, at the same time, a frustrating decision.

Much more was expected from the leaders of both developed, and emerging world powers. Besides, the leaders left abruptly, creating an authority gap, between the political summit and the official Conference of the Parties. A weak COP presidency and the resulting authority gap led the plenary to only “take note” of what the leaders had agreed. The Copenhagen Accord was noted as a political decision, but did not become an “official” agreement under the track of the Convention.

The second step towards the breakthrough was made in Cancun. The pledges under the Copenhagen Accord were adopted by the Cancun Agreement, that has also made official several other decisions made in Copenhagen, as well as some that were left to be finalized by COP16, in Mexico. In Cancun, the voluntary commitments became official ones, under the umbrella of the Climate Convention.

In Durban, negotiators from the United States, the BASIC group, and the European Union underlined the official nature of the Cancun Agreement, as a preparation of the groundwork for the Platform to launch the process leading to the new universal agreement with legal force applicable to all parties to the Climate Convention. In a nutshell, it was acknowledged by all relevant parties that these commitments are legal, although not binding. The difference: the Kyoto Protocol, besides being a legal instrument, explicitly states that the targets for the countries (“industrialized countries”) listed on its Annex I are mandatory. The Cancun Agreement is part and parcel of the Climate Convention, therefore it has legal status, but the commitments registered by the parties are voluntary, not mandatory.

Finally, the Durban Platform takes the decisive step: it commits all major emitters outside the Kyoto Protocol to the negotiation of a new agreement with legal force, under which all commitments will have the same legal treatment, although they could be quantitatively differentiated on the basis of each party’s capacities.

This is not an easy decision to make. Even before it is formally adopted it is likely to cause the countries to start planning domestic actions to enable them to meet the targets yet to be defined. It is unrealistic to imagine, as some environmentalists do, that a “top down approach”, by which a decision under the Climate Convention would bind countries to take actions, would ever work.

Even the Kyoto Protocol praised for its “legally binding” status has no enforcement mechanism. What enforcement mechanism could lead Canada to meet its targets for the first period of commitment next year? None at all. Even with UN officials stating that although outside the Protocol it still has the obligation, Canada will likely fail to meet its Kyoto target, and there will hardly be any consequence to its noncompliance.

Politics hardly moves ahead of the facts. It is not a proactive process. It is a responsive one. Politics responds to active interests in economy and society. It seldom reflects even the “inactive majority” or the majority of “public opinion”. Political decisions respond to “active interest groups”, to economic constraints and inducements, and to the domestic correlation of power. Countries that show greater ambition of emissions reductions also have greater active political support from domestic economic and social forces to policies aiming at coping with climate change. Their domestic policies are usually more ambitious than their multilateral commitments.

If one looks at China’s domestic policies to reduce emissions and other forms of pollution, one will easily see that they are far ahead of what Chinese lead negotiators are willing to commit to at the Climate Convention.

Politics, in this sense, consolidates what countries are ripe to commit to at the multilateral level. The approach that really counts, and leads to progress in the negotiations under the Climate Convention is the bottom up one.

What is meaningful and relevant about the Durban process is that over the last three years major developed and emerging countries have become readier to admit to the possibility of a single climate change regime encompassing them all. The US, China, India, and Brazil said that much several times during COP17, and signed into it at the end. This outcome was not guaranteed at the outset of the climate talks. It was the result of intense negotiation and consultation. Negotiators have likely had to obtain a specific mandate from their leaders, in mid-game, to go as far as they’ve gone.

What will happen next will depend on what happens inside each of these countries. The focus of pressure should be domestic politics, rather than diplomatic undertakings. Not that the COP process doesn’t matter. It does, very much. But its main function is not to shape climate change policies to be adopted domestically. It is to consolidate progress on domestic climate change policies at the multilateral level, adding cross-country constraints and global transparency to the agreed actions. This enables, for instance, a network of domestic and global civil society organizations to join forces to act as watchdogs, to ensure that policies are in line with targets. It does make a difference to have a global accounting system for greenhouse gas emissions, and to have a global registry for quantitative targets for emission reductions. These outcomes would strengthen the multilateral regulatory system, and would also give more punch to domestic pressure from civil society and opposition parties in overseeing their government’s implementation of climate change policies.

The year 2015 has become a new milestone for global climate change politics. Two crucial decisions shall be taken at COP21, if the Durban Platform is to be completed. Firstly, the review of the emission reduction commitments to seek coherence with the 2 degrees Celsius target. As pointed before, it is absolutely sure that the new IPCC report will show a serious gap between committed actions and warming trends. If parties are to take their commitments seriously, they’ll have to revise their targets upwards for the period 2015-2020. Secondly, they’ll have to decide on the new “protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force under the Convention applicable to all Parties” to be adopted no later than 2020.

The political engine is set to move. The pace and destination it will take will depend on the evolution of domestic economic and social forces over the next three years. Another important factor will be the domestic interplay of interests, and the power of pressure and advocacy groups. Bilateral and multilateral politics do have a role, but never a dominant one. Competition and coalition among nations and groups of nations, also help in shaping decisions. They’ll help to pave the way to future outcomes. But they do so by responding to domestic interests and projecting them on the global arena.

Crops that can cope with sudden fluctuations in the weather could be developed, thanks to recent discoveries about the survival mechanisms of plants. Scientists at the University of Edinburgh studying how tiny algae renew old or damaged cell proteins say their findings could be useful in developing crops suited to climates in which weather changes quickly.

They found that the speed at which protein renewal takes place determines how fast they can adapt to environmental changes, such as a sudden frost or drought.

“Until now, we knew that plants replaced their old and damaged proteins, but we had no idea how long this process took for individual proteins, or how this varied between different parts of the plant. Our findings will be useful in understanding more about how plants are programmed for survival,” says Sarah Martin of the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Systems Biology, who led the study.

Renewal rates vary between proteins according to their role and their location within cells. Proteins that carry out photosynthesis – the process that converts sunlight into energy – renew quickly because they are at risk of light damage. Conversely, proteins that protect DNA in plant cells are at little risk of damage, and renew slowly.

These findings could help breed crops incorporating proteins that respond quickly to changing conditions. Conversely, it could also assist development of high-yield crops in stable environments, where little adaptation to conditions is required.

Scientists made their discovery by developing a method to detect how quickly algae take up nitrogen – which is used to produce proteins – from their food. The study was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, and just published in the Journal of Proteome Research.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which provides policy-makers with the current state of climate science, has issued today a statement on the Durban outcome. It shows concern about the decision to “adopt a universal legal agreement on climate change as soon as possible, but not later than 2015, to be adopted and come into force from 2020.” The Durban agreement reinstates the decision to review the Copenhagen/Cancun pledges to reduce emissions in the light of the IPCC next report, to be released in 2013. The IPCC has been asked what impact these agreements will have on global warming.

The statement says that the IPCC is due to publish the first part of its next assessment report, the fifth, in 2013. But in its fourth assessment report, published in 2007, it already showed that an increase of 2 degrees Celsius could have damaging effects. It also says that greenhouse gases must fall by 2050 by 50-85% globally compared to the emissions of the year 2000, and that global emissions must peak well before the year 2020.

The IPCC says that “the series of agreements reached on Sunday by nearly 200 countries in Durban lays a foundation for the global community to tackle climate change.” But it warns “that action must be taken swiftly to cut emissions to prevent a damaging rise in world temperatures.”

See the full text of the statement.

Statement by the IPCC

13 December 2011

Action must be taken swiftly to cut emissions to prevent a damaging rise in world temperatures, Climate Panel findings show

The series of agreements reached on Sunday by nearly 200 countries in Durban lays a foundation for the global community to tackle climate change.

Governments meeting at the annual climate conference of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) decided to adopt a universal legal agreement on climate change as soon as possible, but not later than 2015, to be adopted and come into force from 2020. At the same time they recognized the need to raise their collective level of ambition to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to keep the average global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been asked what impact these agreements will have on global warming.

The IPCC, which provides policy-makers with the current state of climate science, including the impact of climate change and what can be done to tackle it, is due to publish the first part of its next assessment report, the fifth, in 2013.

But already in its fourth assessment report published in 2007, the IPCC showed that a temperature increase of 2 degrees Celsius could have a damaging effect on water supplies, biodiversity, food supplies, coastal flooding and storms and health.

The fourth assessment report shows that emissions of the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming must fall by 2050 by 50-85% globally compared to the emissions of the year 2000, and that global emissions must peak well before the year 2020, with a substantial decline after that, in order to limit the growth in global average temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. In the near term, by 2020, emissions from industrialized countries (listed in Annex I of the Kyoto Protocol) need to be reduced by 25-40% below 1990 levels, while substantial deviations from the current trend in developing countries and emerging economies will also be required

This must be borne in mind in the package. The earlier action is taken, the cheaper and more effective it will be.

Trees are dying in the Sahel, a region in Africa south of the Sahara Desert, and human-caused climate change is to blame, according to a new study led by a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Rainfall in the Sahel has dropped 20-30 percent in the 20th century, the world’s most severe long-term drought since measurements from rainfall gauges began in the mid-1800s,” said study lead author Patrick Gonzalez, who conducted the study while he was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for Forestry. “Previous research already established climate change as the primary cause of the drought, which has overwhelmed the resilience of the trees.”

The study, to appear in the Journal of Arid Environments, was based upon climate change records, aerial photos dating back to 1954, recent satellite images and old-fashioned footwork that included counting and measuring over 1,500 trees in the field. The researchers focused on six countries in the Sahel, from Senegal in West Africa to Chad in Central Africa, at sites where the average temperature warmed up by 0.8 degrees Celsius and rainfall fell as much as 48 percent.

The Sahel is one of the poorest and most vulnerable regions in the world. Recurrent famines have already killed millions of people there. Amartya Sen, the renowned economist has a classic study on the Sahel famines, published in 1983, called “Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation” (Kindle Edition available). Gonzalez says that “people in the Sahel depend upon trees for their survival. Trees provide people with food, firewood, building materials and medicine.”

The Berkeley study found that one in six trees died between 1954 and 2002. In addition, one in five tree species disappeared locally, and indigenous fruit and timber trees that require more moisture took the biggest hit. Hotter, drier conditions dominated population and soil factors in explaining tree mortality, the authors found. Their results indicate that climate change is shifting vegetation zones south toward moister areas.

“In the western U.S., climate change is leading to tree mortality by increasing the vulnerability of trees to bark beetles,” said Gonzalez, who is now the climate change scientist for the National Park Service. “In the Sahel, drying out of the soil directly kills trees. Tree dieback is occurring at the biome level. It’s not just one species that is dying; whole groups of species are dying out.”

Other co-authors of the study are Compton J. Tucker, senior earth scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and Hamady Sy, country representative for Mauritania at the Famine Early Warning Systems Network. Funding from NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey helped support this research.

Sergio Abranches, from Durban

The documents still circulating at COP17 show notable political progress, but fall short of adequately meeting the risks already pointed out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — IPCC — fourth assessment of climate science. They are still under discussion, and final decision may still be significantly different. It is likely, however, they will keep the general thrust of the documents.

Politics is rarely moved by the science on the issues requiring policy decisions. Politics is moved by interests, interactions, power competition, alliances, and conflicts. All that play a strong role to shape the global politics of climate change. At the political level there are unprecedented moves reflected on documents not yet approved by COP17 plenary.

Perhaps the most important one is the support from the United States, China, India and Brazil of a a “process to develop a Protocol or another legal instrument applicable to all Parties under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change”. This process, says the draft document, shall “begin immediately and be conducted as a matter of urgency”, so that the new working group the plenary should create can “complete its work as early as possible but no later than 2015, in order to adopt this legal instrument” at COP21. It “shall raise levels of ambition and be informed, inter alia, by the fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the outcomes of the 2013-2015 review”.

In short this means that by 2020 there should be a common legal regime on climate change encompassing all parties to the climate convention, that this legal instrument could even be a new protocol, thus legally-binding, it would have quantified mitigation targets for all major emitters. The new instrument should be ready to be adopted by 2015, at COP21. The quantitative targets should in line with the new IPCC assessment report, that should be used to guide the review of the commitments made in Copenhagen and reaffirmed on the Cancun Agreement.

The other breakthrough is the formal admission that there is a “significant gap between the aggregated effect of Parties’ mitigation pledges in terms of global annual emissions of greenhouse gases by 2020 and aggregate emissions pathways consistent with having a likely chance of holding warming below 2°C or 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”

In other words the document formally notes, and with grave concern, that there is a gap between the commitments to reduce GHG emissions and the commitment to keep the chances of warming below 2°C or 1.5°C. The 2°C is the target approved under the Copenhagen Accord, and the Cancun Agreement. The 1.5°C is a demand from the small islands states, the African Group, and the Less Developed Countries, admitted by the Cancun Agreement.

These hard to make political steps forward are a sine qua non for a more ambitious, science-based, rule-based future global climate change policy.

Sergio Abranches, from Durban

COP17 president, South African minister of Foreign Relations Maite Emily Nkoana-Mashabane has asked a small group of parties to facilitate the final negotiations towards a package deal to be delivered in Durban. It is a sign that negotiations are moving towards a close. There still are some key issues pending a compromise solution, but all negotiators indicated they’ll cooperate to get the best outcome possible.

The outcome in Durban will be a compromise solution, and the outlines of the package deal to be agreed upon begins to show on the nuances of negotiators’ new statements to the press. Bits and pieces of a coming deal can also be collected on the corridors of the Durban Convention Center.

Connie Hedegaard, EU Commissioner for Climate Action, said the European Union is ready to take a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol (‘second KP’). She said the EU must be assured that others will agree on a new legally binding framework. Europe will sign into a ‘second KP’ even if other countries choose not to join. The EU is not requiring the ‘roadmap’ towards a future legal agreement to go into too many details. It should just show there is a firm decision to arrive at a new agreement, and a timeline with a few significant deadlines. Ideally the agreement should be completed by 2015, to be in force from 2020 onwards, replacing both the Kyoto Protocol, the Copenhagen Accord, and the Cancun Agreement.

US lead negotiator, Todd Stern, often cited as the main opponent to the idea of a commitment to a legally-binding agreement, said his country would have no difficulty to sign into a legally-binding agreement that binds all major emitters with equal legal force. He said he wouldn’t object to agreeing on a process to lead to this agreement. The US would rather discuss the process, and let its unfolding define the legal nature of the outcome, than defining the legal form beforehand, to design a process to get to it. It seems that the EU and the US are fine-tuning their views to move towards a deal that satisfies both.

Todd Stern said he didn’t think China, India, and Brazil are ready to sign into a binding agreement that would give identical legal treatment to developed and emerging nations. No problem there, he said. Commitments  that are not legally-binding, like the ones made in Copenhagen and reaffirmed in Cancun, are politically and morally binding.

He added that the US has no quarrels with the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities, and respective capacity” under a new legal agreement, provided that ‘capacity’ is also taken into account. He said the US interprets this principle as leading to a ‘continuum of responsibilities’, rather than to as a firewall separating in absolute terms all developing countries from the developed or industrialized ones. The US major concern is with the idea that the principle be applied to prevent even the larger emerging powers to have binding emissions targets. Today, they insist their pledges are voluntary, and demand that all developed countries have mandatory targets.

Chinese minister Xie Zenhua said to the plenary of Cop17 high level segment yesterday that China wants a future legally-binding agreement under the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. He arrived in Durban saying that China could accept binding emissions reduction targets.

Negotiators were clearly more confident yesterday night that an agreement might be possible here in Durban. One of them said that the negotiations that started yesterday evening and would continue throughout the day today could be a “watershed”. COP17 will anyway close a chapter of the negotiations that has been opened years ago. It is the last stop before the first period of commitments under the Kyoto Protocol ends. The mandate of the working group created in 2005, during COP11, and the first Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol to decide on other commitment periods will be completed in Durban one way or another. The Protocol will very likely be amended to have a second period to 2020.

Negotiators are clearly making every effort to prevent COP17 from failing. There is a noticeable concern to reach an outcome as significant as possible, in large part as a deference to Africa, the continent most vulnerable to climate change. They are really engaged in the efforts to ensure a second period of commitment under the Kyoto Protocol. The plea made by the Africans at the beginning of COP17 that Africa does not become the graveyard for the Protocol appears to have impressed them all. The risk of a breakdown of the Kyoto Protocol has been progressively reduced by intense negotiations.

The EU is conceding more than it seemed to be willing to concede when negotiations began. The BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India and China), the stronger group within G77+China, is participating of all decisions. South Africa, presiding COP17, is doing its best to make this African climate summit to succeed. Brazil is among the facilitators in the talks leading to the completion of  a package deal. Brazilian negotiators will feel responsible for the package deal, as its coauthors. China arrived in Durban announcing it wants to play a game of cooperation, differently from previous COPs, when China blocked progress in several key issues. India has been striving to ensure parties and press that its position is not different from China’s. The BASIC will likely have a common positive standing on negotiations.

The president of the African Group, Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu, said the Africans have a “vested interest in the success of COP17”. “It is a very important meeting for us in Africa,” he added. None of the demands of the African Group he mentioned seem too difficult to get the support from all negotiators in Durban. The African Group’s minimum expectations are to have a ratifiable second period of commitments under the Kyoto Protocol (‘second KP’), making the Green Climate Fund fully operational, even if some issues remain to be solved later on. “We don’t want it to be an empty shell. But let’s first make sure we have the shell, an then fill it”, he argued. He also said it would be necessary to go back to the Climate Convention fundamentals, through a process that could lead to a future legally-binding deal.

In short, to Africa, the expected package deal would be: the ‘second KP’, the ‘Cancun Package’, to make the Cancun Agreement fully operational, with special reference to the Green Climate Fund, and a ‘process’ to lead to a future common legal framework binding all. Something around these lines, perhaps with a few adjustments to reach a compromise leading to consensus, is likely to be approved at the final plenary.

The Durban outcome will very likely have all the elements demanded by the African Group. There are indications that until 2020 the commitments made in Copenhagen, and built into the UNFCCC tracks by the Cancun Agreement will be considered ‘legal’ commitments, although not ‘fully binding’ commitments. The countries that would sign into the ‘second KP would make their Cancun commitments ‘fully binding’. In other words all commitments to 2020 will be politically binding under the legal framework of the Convention, a smaller portion would also be legally binding under the Kyoto Protocol.

These commitments would be reviewed in 2015, on the basis of IPCC’s fifth report to be approved in 2013-2014. The parties could then decide to raise their ambitions regarding emissions reductions to bring them closer to the findings of climate science. After 2020, a new legal framework will be put in place to regulate actions to meet the climate change challenge.

The Durban outcome is likely to be a mix of some action, and new processes leading to future action.

Global warming is showing no signs of slowing down and further increases are to be expected in the next few decades, shows a new study published today, in the Environmental Research Letters.

They tried to capture “the true global warming trend” by analyzing the five leading global temperature data sets, covering the period from 1979 to 2010, to factor out three of the main factors that account for short-term fluctuations in global temperature: El Niño, volcanic eruptions, and variations in the Sun’s brightness.

Removing these short-term fluctuations, the researchers from Tempo Analytics and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research showed that the global temperature has increased by 0.5°C in the past 30 years. In all of the five global data sets, 2009 and 2010 were the two hottest years. In the average over all five data sets, 2010 is the hottest year on record.

“Our approach shows that the idea that the global warming trend has slowed or even paused over the last decade or so is a groundless misconception. It shows that differences between the five data sets reside, to a large extent, in their short-term variability and not in the climatic trend. After the variability is removed, all five data sets are very similar,” said co-author Stefan Rahmstorf.

By bringing together and analyzing the five records – three surface records and two lower-troposphere records – the researchers were able to clarify the discrepancies between each one and, when factoring out the naturally occurring variability, show the excellent agreement between all five data sets.

The three surface temperature data sets analyzed by the researchers were from NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Hadley Centre/Climate Research Unit in the UK. Data representing the lower troposphere temperatures was based on satellite microwave sensors.

“The unabated warming is powerful evidence that we can expect further temperature increase in the next few decades, emphasizing the urgency of confronting the human influence on the climate,” says, lead author Grant Foster.

Sergio Abranches, from Durban

A perusal of discussions on preliminary results of informal consultations shows that negotiators are streamlining options, preferably to come down to only two alternatives.

This is a signal that negotiators are making relatively fast progress in narrowing down to a few key choices to make in Durban. Disagreements become clearer this way, and negotiations tend to be more finely focused. But this is not a signal that consensus is nearer or easier. Quite often the options that are abandoned on the road towards final decisions are those supported by a small minority; or intermediate solutions, that failed to provide a middle ground for consensus. It seems that in several consultations choices are too polarized to serve as a basis for a compromise. In this case negotiators will have to change their views, reframe the issues, in order to move closer to the center, where consensus could still be built. If they fail to move to fresher positions, they’ll look for an exit option, without necessarily dropping the issue once for all.

In other cases, alternatives confront making a clear decision in Durban, to postponing  decisions. In the informal consultations on “shared visions”, i.e. the targets to reduce carbon emissions, four options were discussed: 1. to “agree on the numbers and set the global goal for emissions reductions and the time frame for global peaking of GHG emissions, before going into other issues; 2. consider first the context for the adoption of the numbers, and postpone decision on numbers; 3. to propose a process for defining numbers and the peak date for emissions, and what should be the steps forward; 4. drop the issue because negotiators are unable to reach an agreement.

The third option is a winner on most difficult negotiations under the Climate Convention. It offers an “exit” solution, without closing any doors for the continuation of the talks on the issue. It has been the most common choice at the end of most COPs.

Some developing countries opposed it at the informal consultation on “shared vision, saying that decision on numbers was necessary for emissions to peak by 2015. Many said dropping the issue was not an option. The third option, about context is weaker than the others. Consultations continued aiming at reducing the number of options. The most likely result will be to present two alternatives to the ministers: decide on the numbers, or define a process for future deliberation on the numbers. Ministers will choose “process” over “numbers”.

“Process” is becoming the “catch word” for this COP17. Todd Stern, US lead negotiator, used it to sum up his thoughts about the European Union’s proposal on a roadmap plus a timeline towards a new common legally-binding agreement. Brazil chief-negotiator, Luiz Alberto Figueiredo also referred to a process, when commenting on the EU ideas. He apparently wanted to distinguish it from the “Bali Roadmap”, yet to be fully implemented.

At the informal consultations, “process” is often seen as a way forward. In a context of lack of agreement on hard issues, the second-best choice is to define a “process” to address the issue later on. Negotiators hope that decision on the “Durban process” would suffice for the EU to sign into a second period of commitment under the Kyoto Protocol, to be in force to 2020.

It seems we are heading to a decision by the plenary of COP17 on “the Durban process”, i.e. deferring all key decisions to a future COP. The magic date seems to be 2015, when a review of the Copenhagen/Cancun pledges to determine how far away they are from meeting the 2C target should be completed. In the meantime parties also hope they can put in place a global accounting system for their GHG emissions, in order to increase transparency of the implementation of pledges. Upon deciding on what to do to close this gap, negotiators would also make more substantive decisions on how to proceed beyond 2020, the deadline for these targets.