Climate Change

Welcome to the future. Like the Security Council, at the UN there is now a ‘climate council' of two, the US and China with a veto over global action on climate change.

The Copenhagen climate conference outcomes, or lack of them, leave open a range of questions over when and how the world will move forward on climate action. But perhaps the biggest of them is about where any major decisions on tackling global warming in future are now likely to be taken. That is, inside or outside the United Nations.

Michael Zammit Cutajar, who was Chair of the key UN negotiating group at Copenhagen seeking a new global climate agreement involving the US and China, responds to Carbon Positive's December 24 editorial Lessons from Copenhagen: Has the UN played its last card?, arguing that the UN is the right instrument for global climate action - if used well...

Looking back on Copenhagen, commentators have questioned whether the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) has the capacity to carry such a complex negotiation forward.

Writing for Carbon Positive, Michael Zammit Cutajar, who was Chair of the key UN negotiating group at Copenhagen on long-term cooperative action, assesses negotiating prospects in 2010 in the lead up to Mexico talks at the end of the year.

If Kyoto 1997 can be said to be the moment when mitigation met the market, Copenhagen 2009 marked the spot where climate change met geopolitics - Carbon Positive's December 24 editorial hit this nail on the head.

BONN, Germany - Agreeing on a U.N. climate treaty in 2010 will be "very difficult" despite a new push to spur negotiations after the Copenhagen summit, the head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat said on Tuesday.

Yvo de Boer, a Dutch citizen who announced plans last week to stand down in July after four years, also suggested to Reuters Television that his successor should be from a developing nation.

Community Forests International is a volunteer-driven organization, working to connect people and their communities to the forests that sustain them. Driven by farmers, foresters, and their rural communities, CFI's programming spans the globe: planting trees with rural villages in Pemba, connecting environmentally-minded youth in India, Tanzania and Canada, and promoting ecological forestry in Atlantic Canada. Find out more: http://forestsinternational.org/

View a short video on Grenada that highlights the impacts of climate change and recent hurricane devastation on the island's development. The production is a product of
the United Nations Department of Public Information in partnership with UN-DESA.

http://bit.ly/aKJchj

UNITED NATIONS - The sense of disarray in the global effort to address climate change deepened Thursday with the resignation of Yvo de Boer, the stolid Dutch bureaucrat who led the international climate change negotiations over four tumultuous years.

His departure, which takes effect on July 1, comes after a largely unsuccessful meeting in Copenhagen in December that was supposed to produce a binding international treaty but instead generated mostly acrimony and a series of unenforceable pledges by nations to reduce their global warming emissions.

OSLO/SINGAPORE, Feb 18 (Reuters) - Efforts to extend the Kyoto climate pact framework risk collapse in a setback to years of diplomatic bargains, as chances fade that the United States will join other rich nations in capping emissions.

December's U.N. climate conference in Denmark failed to cite the U.N.-brokered Kyoto pact as a touchstone -- sapping hopes for a global carbon price to guide billions of dollars in investments from nuclear plants to solar panels.

WASHINGTON, Feb 16, 2010 (IPS) - After decades of debate, the United States is poised to build its first new nuclear reactors since the early 1970s.

Speaking at a job training centre northeast of Washington Tuesday, President Barack Obama announced the federal government would underwrite the construction of two new reactors to be built in Georgia.

Joulukuinen Kööpenhaminan ilmastokokous raapi aikaan asiakirjan, johon valtiot tammikuun aikana ilmoittivat päästöleikkaustavoitteensa. Leikkausten lopputulos on asiantuntijoiden mukaan riittämätön - eikä riittämättömyydessäänkään edes sitova.

Kööpenhaminan ilmastokokous päättyi niin kutsuttuun Kööpenhaminan asiakirjaan (Copenhagen Accord).