Africa Feeling ‘Climate Shocks’

The Associated Press

Africa already is suffering from "climate shocks," the president of Ghana told a 160-nation climate conference Thursday, joining a chorus of calls to speed up the pace of talks on a new agreement to rein in carbon emissions.

More than 1,600 delegates and environmental experts began a week of tough U.N.-sponsored negotiations, hoping to start drafting language for a treaty due to be adopted next year. The agreement would succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

President John Kufuor said Ghana had witnessed devastating drought and floods in recent years, underscoring scientific predictions that Africa will be the worst-hit continent if the Earth’s average temperature continues to rise.

"There is a real need for strengthening the capacity of countries, particularly in Africa, in coping with such climate shocks," he said at the ceremonial opening.

The Kyoto accord focused on the commitment by 37 industrial countries to reduce their emissions by an average 5 percent from 1990 levels by 2012.

The new accord, likely to be called the Copenhagen Agreement since it is due to be concluded in the Danish capital, will partially shift the focus to creating funds and transferring technology to developing countries to help them adapt to climate change while building their economies in climate-friendly ways.

Kufuor said tens of billions of dollars must be channeled to vulnerable countries every year.

Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of the U.N. Convention on Climate Change, said a draft text must be ready within a year if negotiators are to conclude an agreement in Copenhagen in December 2009.

"The negotiations need to speed up and become more concrete if governments are to meet the deadline they set for themselves," he said.

Industrial countries must complete a set of rules to govern their continued reduction of carbon emissions, including the international trade in carbon credits. In a carbon market, similar to the market operating in Europe since 2005, countries can buy and sell credits according to whether they have exceeded or fallen short of their emission targets. Carbon dioxide is the primary greenhouse gas referred to in such trading.

For Africa, a key issue in the Accra talks will be how to reward countries for halting deforestation and providing funds for maintaining the world’s shrinking forest cover. About 20 percent of the increase in human-caused carbon in the atmosphere comes from the forest destruction or degradation, but negotiators have failed to agree on a global policy for protecting the forests.

"There has been no single country that has spoken against" an agreement in general, said John Lanchbery, of Birdlife International, one of dozens of nongovernment organizations attending the conference. "They would like to see it implemented in different ways. But nobody has tried to kill the proposal off. Everyone wants it to happen."

Accra was the third in a series of climate conferences this year. At the meeting scheduled in three months in Poznan, Poland, delegates will begin discussing the emission reduction targets industrial countries should adopt after 2012.

Scientists say emissions must level off within 10 to 15 years and then begin to decline sharply to contain global warming to an acceptable limit.

Leaders at the Group of Eight industrial countries agreed at a July summit to a nonbinding goal to cut their emissions by 50 percent by mid-century, but they declined to discuss shorter term targets.

Danish Climate and Energy Minister Connie Hedegaard, who will chair the critical Copenhagen meeting next year, told the Accra meeting the Group of 8 industrialized nations didn’t go far enough. "Agreeing to halve emissions by 2050 is one thing. We must have midterm targets," she said.

But she also said the industrial powerhouses could not do the job alone. Smaller economies must do their share, she said, applauding a plan adopted by South Africa last month to reach a peak in carbon emissions by 2025 and to impose mandatory energy efficiency.