China Diplomacy Shows Copenhagen's Big Issue

Climate Change Minister Penny Wong's brief visit to China in early October for discussions with her counterpart highlight one of the major issues facing negotiators at the upcoming Copenhagen climate negotiations.

The discussions aparently centred around how developing countries can participate in a verifiable and reliable program to register their emissions mitigation efforts and the expected outcomes. This is important because developed countries like Australia and the US are required to make binding commitments to emissions reductions and the US will not agree to a 'new deal' unless developing countries take responsibility for and record and report their own mitigation efforts and expectations.

It is important to note that nothing that was discussed between Australia and China about how this could occur would possibly have been about mandatory emissions reductions. That is not open to discussion for developing countries who argue that they are not responsible for the significant portion of emissions to date. At least not in the same way as developed countries.

If the Australian proposal is acceptable and developing countries take up a share of the emissions mitigation actions in this non-mandatory manner, there will still be serious issues to address before a deal can be done at Copenhagen.

The other issues that will have to be resolved in many ways relate to how the developed countries can assist developing countries to reduce emissions while maintaining economic growth and improving living standards. These issues include financing, technology transfer and the possible inclusion of avoided deforestation programs where there are significant opportunities for reducing emissions from many developing countries.

The November 2009 edition of CarbonEdge will be released on 27th November. It will include detailed and easily understood information and analysis on international agreements, the negotiations, key country positions and the major topics.

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18th October 2009

 

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