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| Climate change meet fails to record major achievements |
| Sreelatha Menon / New Delhi Dec 16, 2008, 00:51 IST |
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The climate change conference in Poznan, which ended last week, would be remembered for little else but the activation of the Adaptation Fund a year after it was set up.
Developing countries, including India to some extent, can now send proposals to the Fund for projects to safeguard vulnerable communities and areas against impacts of climate change and global warming.
R R Rashmi, the delegate from the Ministry of Environment and Forests who attended the conference in Poznan, said the meet itself failed to achieve anything as far as issues like deepening of cuts in carbon emissions were concerned or, for that matter, any other issue that could lead to a global climate agreement in 2009-end.
The agreement is to replace the existing 5 per cent carbon emission cuts at the 1990 levels prescribed under the Kyoto Protocol, to which many industrialised nations except the US and Australia are signatories.
“As far as Adaptation Fund is concerned, it is meant mostly for the small developing countries and hence though India will soon seek assistance for adaptation projects, it will always be a second priority for the $60 million Fund to which 2 per cent of funds coming from the sale of carbon credits accrue,” Rashmi said. However, India would begin sending proposals once the government finalised the climate action plan this month, he added.
At the Poznan summit, the parties concerned struggled to prepare a negotiating document to continue talks but failed, Rashmi said.
What has indeed been achieved is a broad workplan to enable all parties to send proposals on various issues. The negotiating document itself will be prepared only by June 2009 in Bonn, according to Rashmi.
The ministry also dismissed apprehensions over REDD or Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation.
Rashmi said India was able to drive its point in this matter that there should be incentive for increasing forest cover as much as there was incentive for reducing deforestation.
The United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC), released after the end of the summit, mentioned activation of the Adaptation Fund and the progress made in the area of technology with the endorsement of the Global Environment Facility’s “Poznan Strategic Programme on Technology Transfer”, as some of its achievements.
The aim of the technology transfer programme is to scale up the level of investment by leveraging private investments that developing countries require both for “mitigation and adaptation technologies”, UNFCCC said.
“We will now move to the next level of negotiations, which involves crafting a concrete negotiating text for the agreed outcome,” said the President of the conference, Polish Minister of Environment Maciej Nowicki.
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