【COP21連線】氣候協議草案「貧弱」 環團抗議

With just two days to go before the United Nations COP21 climate talks in Paris are scheduled to conclude, it's crunch time for the negotiating ministers.

The latest version of the draft outcome text released today outlines the choices still on the table.

Today, after negotiators tabled what they called a “weak draft climate deal,” hundreds of civil society demonstrators staged a noisy protest inside the conference venue to say that politicians are “failing to provide a fair and just climate deal in Paris.”

Friends of the Earth International climate justice and energy coordinator Sara Shaw said, “Our governments must not settle for the draft text as it stands. People on the frontline of climate change, who are already suffering as a result of climate change, demand that rich countries to do their fair share of emissions reductions and provide necessary finance for an energy transformation in Southern countries. The draft deal fails these frontline communities.”

“Today's text shows no progress on crucial issues, including ambition, differentiation, equity, finance, loss and damage. Many of the most important issues remain in brackets,” said Shaw.

Tasneem Essop, WWF's head of delegation to the UN climate talks in Paris, was more optimistic, saying, “We still have the ingredients for an ambitious outcome in Paris.”

“But they still haven't taken the hard decisions yet. Ministers now have just two days to decide to either put us on a path that will limit us to 1.5°Celsius of warming, or towards a 3°Celsius world,” said Essop.

“The text now includes more options to have all nations come back to the table by 2020 to improve their current pledges,” said Essop. “That said, they'll need to close existing loopholes to make sure any pre-2020 review and ratcheting up mechanism is comprehensive – covering adaptation, finance, and emissions reductions – and does not let some countries off the hook.”

Greenpeace Climate Policy Advisor Kaisa Kosonen is critical of the draft text but still hopeful that a stronger final deal can be reached.

“It's good that a temperature goal of 1.5 degrees C is still there. It's bad that countries' emissions targets are so weak and there's very little in the text that makes them come back soon with something better,” she said.

“But worst is the deadline for phasing out carbon emissions,” Kosonen said. “Right now this draft deal contains wishy-washy language instead of setting a tight deadline of 2050. Without a date it won't have weight.”

Peter Carter of the Climate Emergency Institute is concerned that “the oceans have not survived the negotiations.”

This is despite “the excellent ocean coverage” by IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report, and requests to the UN Climate Secretariat by U.S. and EU ocean agencies to include oceans in the agreement.

“Even measures that could mitigate the disastrous ocean situation are not in the agreement,” warned Carter. “The atmospheric greenhouse gas pollution situation for the oceans is dire – without doubt a planetary emergency.”

Carter stresses that as the planetary temperature rises the oceans will suffer impacts such as irreversible heating, acidification, and de-oxygenation lasting 1,000s of years.

He wants to see in the agreement atmospheric carbon dioxide and other gas concentration safety limits. Carter calls this the safety requirement metric of the 1992 UNFCCC, impacting ocean heating and acidification.

The text mentions the ocean for the first time in the preamble to the agreement, but the preamble is not legally binding.

Later paragraphs refer to the need to enhance greenhouse gas sinks to help absorb CO2 emissions, and to foster ecosystem integrity, vague wording that can be taken to refer to coastal and ocean ecosystems as well as land-based ones.

Climate finance expert Torsten Thiele, of the Global Ocean Trust, said, “I see this draft as a case of the glass is half full. We got ocean in the substance and also symbolically in the preamble of the draft. This is good news but we need to encourage the negotiators to continue to work to get to an ambitious agreement without the brackets.”

The agreement should state a specified year for emissions to peak, an immediate time frame for mitigation of multiple catastrophic impacts on oceans, ocean campaigners demand.

Carter and other critics warn that carbon pricing is not included in the draft text despite calls to include it this year from most of the largest corporations, including the chief executive officers of banks and fossil fuel corporations.

And finally, critics are disappointed that the draft does not call a halt to fossil fuel subsidies despite a universal call for termination, including at the G7 meeting of the world's industrialized nations in June 2015.