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 Even if it succeeds, it's worth reconsidering whether the
international confabs need to be held every year, and whether the
scope of each session should be narrower, Hedegaard told The
Associated Press on Sunday.
"Maybe it would be time now to think if there should be themes for
the conferences so that not each conference is about everything,"
she said in a telephone interview.
In two decades, the U.N. talks have failed to provide a cure to the
world's fever. Heat-trapping carbon emissions that scientists say
are warming the planet are growing each year as most countries still
depend on coal and oil to fuel their economies.
Besides those emissions, the U.N. talks deal with a range of complex
issues, including monitoring and verification of climate actions,
accounting rules, and helping developing countries cope with sea
level rise, desertification and other climate impacts as they
transition to clean energy.
The two-week session that ended Saturday in Warsaw nearly collapsed
in overtime before agreements were watered down to a point where no
country was promising anything concrete.
On the final day, sleep-deprived delegates spent hours wrangling
over the wording of paragraphs and bickering over procedure, like
when Venezuela questioned why the U.S. got to speak before Fiji in
the plenary.
As the gavel dropped, negotiators emerged with a vague road map on
how to prepare for a global climate pact they're supposed to adopt
in two years — work Hedegaard said will be crucial in answering
whether the world still needs the U.N. process.
"I think that it has to deliver a substantial answer to climate
change in 2015," Hedegaard said. "If it fails to do so, then I think
this critical question will be asked by many more."
Many climate initiatives are happening far from the U.N.
negotiations as local and national governments pursue low-carbon
energy sources and energy efficiency. Even international efforts are
increasingly taking place outside the U.N. climate framework.
Governments are working together to slash funding for coal projects,
reduce soot and other short-lived climate pollutants and to phase
out subsidies for fossil fuels.
China and the U.S. — the world's two biggest carbon polluters — this
year agreed to work jointly on energy efficiency, carbon capture
technology and other mitigation projects.
"This was a missed opportunity to set the world on a path to a
global climate deal in 2015, with progress painfully slow," said
Mohamed Adow, a climate change adviser at Christian Aid. "We need a
clear plan to fairly divide the global effort of responding to
climate change and a timeline of when that will happen."
To avoid the brinksmanship of the U.N. negotiations, many countries,
both developed and developing, want to stop the fast rise of potent
greenhouse gases called HFCs using another treaty that essentially
eliminated the use of ozone-depleting chemicals.
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Some observers couldn't help noting that the Warsaw talks were held
in a soccer stadium where delegates were literally moving around in
circles.
"It is hard to resist that as a metaphor" for the U.N. process, said
Nathaniel Keohane, vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund
and a former special assistant on climate and energy to President
Barack Obama.
The Warsaw talks advanced a program to reduce deforestation in
developing countries but made only marginal progress on building the
framework for a deal in Paris in 2015. Key issues like its legal
form and how it will differentiate between the commitments of
developed and developing remain unresolved.
"If we go to Paris and say we didn't completely get this done I
think ... the world will draw the conclusion you really cannot trust
the U.N. to deliver on this process," said Jake Schmidt, a climate
expert at the Natural Resource Defense Council.
Asked about the point of the U.N. talks, U.S. climate envoy Todd
Stern said "it's important to have an international agreement to
provide confidence to other countries that if they are ready to step
forward and take action, that their partners, their competitors,
others are doing the same thing."
Still, he said international action won't do the job in reducing the
use of fossil fuels and increasing energy efficiency. "We all know
that any policies that do those things fundamentally happen at the
national level," Stern said.
Jennifer Morgan, of the World Resources Institute, praised national
actions from expanding solar power in Germany to new wind farms in
Brazil but said they're not enough.
U.N. studies show global emissions need to peak in 2020 and then
start falling to stabilize warming at 2 degrees C (3.6 F), a level
countries hope will avoid the worst consequences of climate change.
"The U.N. is the one place where all countries come together and
everyone has a voice," Morgan said. "World leaders simply need to
set their sights higher and empower their teams to engage in a more
constructive way. Without much greater ambition and action, we will
soon be headed to a far more turbulent and dangerous world."
[Associated
Press; KARL RITTER]
Karl Ritter can be
reached at
http://twitter.com/karl_ritter.
Copyright 2013 The Associated
Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
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