Bali confronts life after Kyoto

Earlier this month scientists issued their bleakest warning yet on climate change. Now it is up to governments to put in place a new global agreement on reducing carbon emissions. The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali (3-14 December) will show how committed the world is to fighting global warming. Jennifer Rankin reports.

The island of Bali is known in a thousand tourist brochures for its sandy beaches, lush forests and fragile coral reefs. Soon it will also be synonymous with the global circus of international climate-change talks. For two weeks next month (3-14 December) more than 5,000 people from 180 countries will converge on the ‘island of the gods’ to discuss the man-made problem of global warming. What they agree - if anything - at this 13th United Nations Climate Change Conference will determine whether they remain on track to cut the world’s carbon emissions by the middle of the century and avoid the most dangerous effects of climate change.

The test of the conference is whether countries agree a mandate to start talks on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 treaty that set binding emissions cuts for 38 developed countries. The first phase of the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012 and if no follow-up is in place by the end of 2009, many policymakers fear that the fight against climate change will falter. While there is no technical reason that talks cannot continue beyond 2009, there is a wide consensus that failure to reach a deal would be disastrous given the urgency of climate change.

The timetable is already eye-wateringly tight. If a post-Kyoto deal is agreed in 2009, that would allow just three years for ratification. The original Kyoto protocol took eight years to come into force from agreement to ratification.

Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of the UN framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC), whose secretariat is preparing the Bali summit, said on 13 November that failure to act at Bali would be "criminally irresponsible". The markets would be given mixed signals if there was no new regime for cutting emissions after 2012 and it would be harder to reverse the upward path of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to prevent the climate warming by two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The ‘two degrees limit’ is seen by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as the ceiling for preventing unmanageable and unacceptable damage from climate change.

This year’s G8 summit at Heiligendamm in Germany seems to have put the modest goal of launching the mandate at Bali within reach. It was there in June that leaders of the world’s leading industrialised countries agreed to negotiate a post-2012 deal within a United Nations framework by 2009 and won the support of the Group of 5 countries - the emerging economies of China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa.

Nevertheless, participants are not taking success at Bali for granted. "It is still a bit of a cliff-hanger about whether we get a unanimous agreement at Bali," says John Hay, of the UNFCCC’s secretariat in Bonn. And even if Bali results in the modest decision to launch talks, the much tougher job of agreeing emissions cuts is still to come. The crucial bargain on emissions cuts among the rich countries is most likely to be hammered out at the UNFCCC’s 15th conference in Copenhagen in 2009 (CoP15).

Bali is just the latest staging post in a long series of international talks on climate change. The agenda has been packed for climate-change summiteers over the last year: as well as the G8 summit at Heiligendamm, climate change has been discussed at the UN Security Council, the UN economic and social council and at a one-off ‘high-level’ event in New York organised by the UN in September. Indeed, as politicians criss-cross the globe, some diplomats worry that expectations for Bali may be too high, since the meeting is really about keeping a process on track, rather than delivering tangible outcomes, such as cuts in CO2.

If Bali is a critical summit, it is because the window for tackling climate change is so narrow. Most experts agree that the world has just ten to 15 years to stop very damaging climate change in the future. The contrast between rapidly-advancing climate change and the glacial pace of climate-change talks is acute.

CoPs and MoPs

• The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is the international framework for global efforts to tackle climate change. The framework was drawn up at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and came into force in 1994. It has near worldwide membership. As laid down in the treaty, the ultimate objective of the convention is "stabilisation of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system".

• The Kyoto Protocol shares the objectives and institutions of the convention, but while the convention only encourages rich countries to make emissions cuts, the protocol commits them to do so.

• The Conference of the Parties (CoP) comprises those countries that are party to the UNFCCC and as such the highest decision-making body in the convention. The CoP meets annually to review progress on the convention. Bali is the 13th meeting - hence is known as CoP13.

• The Meeting of the Parties/Conference of the Meeting of the Parties comprises all the countries that are subject to the Kyoto Protocol. Bali is the third meeting - hence is known as MoP3 or CMP3.

Earlier this month scientists issued their bleakest warning yet on climate change. Now it is up to governments to put in place a new global agreement on reducing carbon emissions. The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali (3-14 December) will show how committed the world is to fighting global warming. Jennifer Rankin reports.