UNFCCC

Sebastian Foot hadn’t meant to create such a frustrating job for himself.

Last year, he founded a Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) project finance structuring firm called Frontier Advisors with the “intention to take equity” in the emerging green market space. Instead, he ended up in a constant tussle with an interminably slippery bureaucracy that is the UNFCCC CDM Executive Board.

Foot has watched the debate surrounding its reform, and, in his mind, it doesn’t go far enough.

Reporting from London

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change would be far more effective if it relied more on smaller, representative groups of countries meeting year-round to hammer out the details of a future climate agreement, Britain’s climate change secretary, Ed Miliband, told Parliament.

He also suggested that the leadership of the UNFCCC’s annual Conference of Parties meetings needs an overhaul — instead of career politicians leading the way toward an international agreement, the COP needs diplomatic and climate change experts at the helm.

Yvo de Boer's resignation as UN climate chief has left developing country advocates both hopeful and uneasy over the future of global warming negotiations that have been thrown into disarray by a rich-poor rift.

The world is losing a tireless advocate for a new UN climate treaty, advocacy groups say, but some also argue that fresh leadership could spur a reversal of the deterioration that has characterized talks lately.

"De Boer is only an executive, and the impact of changing him is similar to a change of an executive in any organization,” said Wael Hmaidan, executive director of Lebanon-based IndyACT who has been involved in the UN climate negotiations since 1999. "It depends on who replaces de Boer. Maybe it will have a positive impact."

The key is finding a person who is "trusted by all," Hmaidan told SolveClimate, adding that "trust is missing in the secretariat by developing countries."

China, India, South Africa and Brazil — the so-called BASIC bloc of nations — said the nonbinding deal that came out of the Copenhagen climate summit was just a "political understanding" and that future climate negotiations must not be based on that plan.

The skeletal Copenhagen Accord was brokered among the BASIC nations and the United States in the frantic final hours of the December talks. The UN Conference of Parties 'took note' of its existence but fell short of the full support needed to adopt it.

In a statement released on Jan. 24, the newly powerful BASIC bloc said that it supports the Copenhagen Accord but that formal climate talks must move along two tracks only — one that would extend the Kyoto Protocol for the 184 nations that signed it and another that would add an agreement to govern the United States and emerging economies.

The Kyoto Protocol, the world's only legal agreement to fight global warming, survived Copenhagen but its future remains very much in doubt.

The treaty, which binds 37 nations to emissions cuts, is still "an active agreement," but it appears "to be on life support," Erich Pica, executive director of Friends of the Earth USA, told SolveClimate.

The Dec. 7-18 Copenhagen talks failed to resolve the rich-poor impasse over the 1997 protocol.

Instead, the world agreed to "continue its work" on Kyoto until the next climate conference in Mexico in December 2010 — leaving open the possibility of downgrading or replacing it less than a year from now.

Reporting from Copenhagen

Certainty is a luxury. When you’re rich, you can insure anything that isn’t certain. But when you’re poor and growing crops in Malawi, herding sheep in Mongolia, or sowing rice in Bangladesh, you’re at the mercy of the weather, a fickle force made even more so by climate change.

The governments of developing countries are already partly reliant on microfinance schemes to alleviate poverty. Now, several groups are calling for international support for a different type of microfinance — microinsurance — to help mitigate the risks posed by severe and abnormal weather patterns brought on by global warming.

Consider a farmer in Malawi who takes out a loan to buy seed for groundnuts, a common financial scenario among poor farmers in the region.

If a new international climate treaty is to unleash a worldwide "cleantech" explosion, then countries must go far beyond carbon trading and spotlight the role of technologies in cutting climate change pollution, according to a new analysis.

"There should be an emphasis on the role of technology in reducing carbon emissions and allowing the planet to do more with less," the Cleantech Group writes in an analysis explaining why the Copenhagen climate talks won't drive cleantech for now.

"Carbon trading will help, but the challenge of climate mitigation or adaption goes far beyond regulating the industrial emissions that carbon trading is largely aimed at."

Cleantech refers to the use of technology to boost energy efficiency while slashing costs and consumption. The sector represents "the largest investment opportunity on the planet," said Dallas Kachan, managing director of the Cleantech Group. But the world as a whole hasn't even begun to tap it in the way it should.

The absence of cleantech attention in UN climate negotiations is "a legacy" of them "having traditionally been focused on emissions reduction," Kachan told SolveClimate.

For a "truly meaningful" international climate accord, things must change.

Reporting from Barcelona, Spain

A new global warming pact coming out of Copenhagen in December must be a legally enforceable treaty, not just promises from politicians, developing nations said at the Barcelona talks on Wednesday.

The statement was in response to rich nations' newest push for a "politically binding" deal, the idea being it's way too late to get a legal one on the books by December.

Political agreements "are worth very little," said Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping (above), the Sudanese chair of the Group of 77 and China.

"Tell me of any politician who delivered on his political manifesto?"

Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen started the firestorm on Monday when he said, "We are working very strongly to reach a politically binding agreement in Copenhagen." Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt added to that on Wednesday, stating on Swedish Radio that a legal treaty is "simply not possible to deliver."

The G20 failed to produce a climate change financing plan for developing nations at its Pittsburgh meeting this past week. It took a step forward on cutting greenhouse gas emissions by agreeing to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, but on both issues, the details were pushed aside until the next G20 finance ministers’ meeting.

That meeting isn't until November, one month before world leaders gather for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change at Copenhagen.

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barraso and environmental groups were dismayed by the delay and warned that time is running out.

Speaking at the close of the Pittsburgh meeting, Barraso said the world’s most powerful nations aren’t moving fast enough on climate change financing and related issues to have an agreement that could replace the Kyoto Protocol ready by the start of the Copenhagen summit.

"Negotiations cannot be an open-ended process," Barraso said. "This is a test of credibility for the G20 — failure is not an option."

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After a disappointing UN climate summit speech that expounded on the dangers of global warming but offered no new U.S. commitments to stop it, President Obama has one more chance this week to take charge as a climate leader as the international action moves to Pittsburgh for a two-day G20 meeting.

When Obama organized the Pittsburgh gathering of the world's wealthiest nations, he tasked the G20 finance ministers with developing a plan for rich countries to help developing nations deploy clean energy and adapt to climate change.

The divide between developed and developing nations over that funding has become one of the largest barriers to a new climate agreement at Copenhagen in December.

It also appears to be increasingly pushed down the G20 agenda, behind the global economic recovery and even bankers' bonuses. Rather than financing, President Obama has focused his G20 statements on a new proposal to phase out fossil fuel subsidies instead.

"It's time for heads of state to step up as world leaders and start putting adequate figures on the tables," said Barbara Stocking, CEO of Oxfam Great Britain, whose group is calling for a commitment of $150 billion a year for developing nations.

"We do not have the luxury of time with climate change. Too long have these negotiations been treated like trade talks, with countries watching out for their own individual interests."