Alternative energy will be a major talking point in 2012, thanks to the UN’s decision to declare it as the International Year of Sustainable Energy for All. The decision was made back in December 2010 during a UN General Assembly. The initiative recognizes that access to “modern affordable energy services in developing countries is essential for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals and sustainable development.”

In 2012 the Secretary-General in consultation with the inter-agency group UN-Energy will be working to increase awareness of the importance of addressing energy issues, including modern energy services for all, access to affordable energy, energy efficiency and the sustainability of energy sources and use at local, national, regional and international levels.

The hope is to reach three major objectives by 2030:

• Ensuring universal access to modern energy services;
• Doubling the rate of improvement in energy efficiency;
• Doubling the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix.

The launch of the International Year of Sustainable Energy for All will take place at the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi, UAE, between January 16th and 18th. This event will be followed by several other ones throughout the year, including the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro in June.

Have a happy, sustainable 2012 and may alternative energy get stronger in the coming year!

Article by Antonio Pasolini, a Brazilian writer and video art curator based in London, UK. He holds a BA in journalism and an MA in film and television.

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This short piece will certainly not help the reader gain any greater understanding of the United Nations: its strengths, weaknesses, successes and failings. I’d love to get my wits wrapped around the UN, largely regarded, I believe, as insufficiently aggressive in taking action into pressing world affairs, even where it’s clearly and urgently needed. But regardless of one’s opinion of the organization and its shortcomings, I’d have to think that the article it released today should have some level of impact on our thinking.

For instance, is it true, as the report posits, that humanity is near to breaching the sustainability of Earth, and needs a technological revolution greater and faster than the industrial revolution to avoid “a major planetary catastrophe?” That’s pretty strong stuff.

The report, “The World Economic and Social Survey 2011: The Great Green Technological Transformation,” places a great deal of blame on our energy use – particularly oil, coal, and gas.

Quotes include:

“It is rapidly expanding energy use, mainly driven by fossil fuels, that explains why humanity is on the verge of breaching planetary sustainability boundaries through global warming, biodiversity loss, and disturbance of the nitrogen-cycle balance and other measures of the sustainability of the Earth’s ecosystem.”

and

“A comprehensive global energy transition is urgently needed in order to avert a major planetary catastrophe.”

I would think that this would get people’s attention. But, of course, I’m known to have been wrong before….

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(Reuters) – U.N. climate talks will struggle to agree new greenhouse gas targets next month unless they can solve a complex loophole where developed countries currently ignore emissions from logging plantation forests.

Environment ministers from almost 200 countries will gather in Cancun, Mexico, from November 29 to December 10 to try to toughen the world’s response to climate change.

U.N. executives want rich countries in Cancun to make present emissions pledges binding under a U.N. deal, now expected to be finalized in December 2011.

One of the biggest hurdles to agreeing such targets is an accounting riddle over how to treat plantation forests: emissions from felling trees are simply ignored under the present Kyoto Protocol, whose first round ends in 2012.

“It is a big issue particularly when it comes to determining your emissions reduction targets, and particularly for some countries which have a lot of forests,” said Artur Runge-Metzger, the European Union’s chief negotiator.

“It was a kind of loophole and a weakness of the Kyoto architecture and there’s a need to address that.”

Plantation forests, largely in developed countries, are used for pulp, paper and timber, and a market is rapidly growing for use of biomass to generate electricity, while huge future demand is foreseen for advanced transport fuels, made from wood.

Trees suck the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide out of the air as they grow. That effect offsets 10-15 percent of the entire emissions of Russia — which has vast forests — underlining the importance of the issue to some countries.

But it is also one of the most esoteric issues at the U.N. talks, sometimes mocked by climate aficionados for its unwieldy acronym, LULUCF (land use, land-use change and forests).

Forests

A deal on emissions from plantations is also important because the fine print will equally apply to an agreement later on saving tropical forests, where developing countries will be paid not to destroy rainforests.

“All the issues we are discussing here, you will have similar issues when it comes to tropical forests, and the issue of the reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation,” said Runge-Metzger.

Under Kyoto, nearly 40 developed countries have emissions reduction targets from 2008-12.

At present, such countries can exclude from their targets emissions from chopping trees, but include the credit from the carbon stored by growing trees, making it appear a loophole.

Details of a LULUCF deal include whether to make emissions accounting mandatory, what cap should be placed on credit from stored carbon, and how to account for forest fires and for wood products including houses which are made from felled trees and do not add to carbon emissions immediately.

Mandatory reporting with some cap on credits would form a likely compromise, Runge-Metzger said.

In addition, some countries want reference levels of deforestation, where they build in to their targets expected increases in logging, an approach Greenpeace rejected.

“We see this as quite a flawed approach,” said campaigner Paul Winn, favoring reporting of emissions or credits in any one year, with credits discounted by 85 percent.

Article by Gerard Wynn, appearing courtesy Reuters.

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(Reuters) – The U.N. climate change chief urged governments on Monday to make real steps toward a new treaty to fight global warming or risk throwing negotiations into doubt.

Negotiators are meeting in the northern Chinese port city of Tianjin to try reach agreement on what should follow the current phase of the Kyoto Protocol, the key treaty on climate change, which expires in 2012.

The fraught U.N. talks have been hobbled by lack of trust between rich and poor nations over climate funds, demand for more transparency over emissions cut pledges and anger over the size of cuts offered by rich nations.

Delaying agreement would leave less time for the world to figure out how to rein in greenhouse gas emissions and would add to uncertainties weighing on companies unsure where climate policy and carbon markets are headed after 2012.

“Now is the time to accelerate the search for common ground,” Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, told hundreds of delegates from some 177 countries at the opening session of the Tianjin talks, which last until Saturday.

“A concrete outcome in Cancun is crucially needed to restore the faith and ability of parties to take the process forward, to prevent multilateralism from being perceived as a never-ending road,” she said in an opening speech at the meeting.

The talks are the last major round before the year’s main climate meeting in the Mexican resort of Cancun from November 29.

Negotiators from nearly 200 governments failed to agree last year on a new legally binding climate pact. A meeting in Copenhagen in late 2009 ended in bitter sniping between rich and developing countries, and produced a non-binding accord that left many key issues unsettled.

Governments are struggling to overcome lingering distrust and turn sprawling draft treaties dotted with caveats into a binding agreement, possibly by late 2011.

“This week is to some extent going to be an indicator of how far forward we can go,” the U.S. negotiator at the Tianjin talks, Jonathan Pershing, told Reuters.

“It now looks like the differences are quite large, but there’s some hope of achieving consensus on some issues,” the chief Chinese climate negotiator, Xie Zhenhua, told reporters.

DROUGHTS AND FLOODS

Recent devastating floods in Pakistan and severe drought in Russia are the kind of severe weather that rising temperatures are likely to magnify if countries fail to make dramatic cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, said Wendel Trio, the climate policy coordinator for Greenpeace.

Figueres told Reuters in a separate interview that she hoped the Tianjin talks could agree on important specifics of a future pact, including how to manage adaptation funds and green technology to help poorer countries, and a program to support carbon-absorbing forests in Brazil, Indonesia and elsewhere.

“I think there’s a pretty good chance that the governments will agree on the creation of the (climate) fund,” she said.

Governments have said the fund could disperse up to $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poor countries cope with global warming. But negotiators have been wrestling over how to manage the money and the fund’s design.

Developing countries want a more direct say, while the United States and other countries that would provide the funding want more vetting.

“When you’re thinking about that scale of finance…we want to think about people who have expertise,” said Pershing, the U.S. negotiator. “There’s clearly a need to bring in guidance.”

He said that could come from ensuring countries’ finance ministries and other economic agencies help oversee spending.

Even if the negotiations make progress, the current pledges of governments to curb greenhouse gas emissions will not be enough to avoid pushing the world into dangerous global warming, roughly defined as a rise of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) above average pre-industrial temperatures, said Figueres.

Governments should nonetheless focus on securing formal pledges of the emissions cuts already made, “fully realizing it is a first, necessary but insufficient step,” she said.

Article by Chris Buckley, edited by David Fogarty, appearing courtesy Reuters.

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(Reuters) – About 45 nations met on Thursday to seek ways to raise billions of dollars in aid to help the poor combat climate change as the United Nations warned them of a long haul to slow global warming.

Environment ministers and senior officials in Geneva were reviewing whether rich nations, hit by austerity cuts, are keeping a promise of $30 billion in “new and additional” climate aid for 2010-12 made at the U.N.’s Copenhagen summit.

“The funds are critical” to build trust between rich and poor, Christiana Figueres, the U.N.’s climate chief, told Reuters in an interview.

About 120 countries in Copenhagen also pledged to increase aid for developing nations to $100 billion aid a year from 2020.

Figueres said cash could be a key to unlock progress on other climate problems, such as sharing clean technologies or protecting carbon-storing forests at the next meeting of environment ministers in Cancun, Mexico, from November 29-December 10.

Swiss Environment Minister Moritz Leuenberger told the start of the two-day talks that “the regulation of the financial issues is a key precondition for the successful conclusion of the climate negotiations in Cancun.”

But Figueres predicted there would be no new global treaty to combat climate change in Cancun, even though she said that extreme weather such as floods in Pakistan or Russia’s heat wave were “warning bells” about the risks of inaction.

“I don’t think that governments are considering (a treaty) for Cancun,” she said. A year ago, many nations were hoping that the Copenhagen summit in December would be a “big bang” deal to help solve climate change.

But that didn’t happen and Figueres said it was more realistic to look for gradual progress in solving climate change, adding that there was no “magic bullet.”

Cancun could end up setting a new deadline for working out a more binding deal, perhaps by the end of 2012.

CANCUN

Figueres said it was vital that developed nations be able to point to $10 billion allocated to climate aid for 2010 by the time they meet in Cancun. But she urged developing nations to give leeway in judging if it was truly “new and additional” as agreed in Copenhagen.’

She said that all nations’ 2010 budgets were agreed by national parliaments by the time of the December summit. “There are justifiable reasons to see why 100 percent of this allocation (in 2010) will not be additional,” she said.

The Netherlands plans to launch a new website on Friday to track climate promises.

An overview by Reuters shows that aid promises total $29.8 billion for 2010-12, but it is unclear how much is new. Japan, for instance, has pledged the most aid, at $15 billion, but much of that was decided several years ago.

Figueres told a news conference that the Copenhagen pledge meant $100 billion a year from 2020 was a “minimum” required.

She also said that the world could make progress even if the United States did not pass legislation to curb emissions by 2020 in line what she called a “pledge” by President Barack Obama in Copenhagen. U.S. legislation has stalled in the Senate.

Article by Alister Doyle, edited by Noah Barkin; appearing courtesy Reuters.

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(Reuters) – A UN panel will review carbon offset issuances requests by three Chinese greenhouse gas destroying projects, a UN spokeswoman said on Tuesday, a sign the most lucrative projects under the Kyoto Protocol may face more scrutiny.

The Shandong Dongyuen, Zhejiang Dongyang and China Fluoro projects, which destroy a potent gas called hydrofluorocarbon-23 and are approved under Kyoto’s $2.7 billion Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), had requested 4.5 million offsets, called Certified Emissions Reductions (CERs), from the UN’s climate change secretariat.

The CDM funds clean energy projects in emerging economies.

“There has been a request for review of the request for issuance,” a UN spokeswoman told Point Carbon News in an email.

Issuance to these three projects will now likely be delayed for at least two months as the board investigates the requests further, a move which could tighten CER supply further and drive up prices.

HFC projects approved under the CDM were accused by green groups earlier this year of intentionally upping their emissions in order to destroy them and collect more CERs.

The CDM’s executive board last month asked a working group to investigate the claims further.

There are around 20 HFC projects registered under the CDM and they account for around half of the 428.5 million CERs issued by the UN to date.

Technical problems following the implementation of new procedures at the UN’s climate arm had prevented the agency from publishing on its website which projects would have their CER issuance requests reviewed.

According to UN data, the three HFC projects’ CER buyers include Italian utility ENEL, Britain’s Natsource and Japan’s Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, Mitsui & Co., Tokyo Electric and Nippon Steel.

The three projects have received 45 million CERs to date.

A Chinese government fund told the CDM’s executive board in June it supported the country’s HFC project developers.

CERs futures for December delivery traded up 15 cents or 1.2 percent to 12.45 euros a tonne on Tuesday morning.

Article by Michael Szabo; Edited by Sue Thomas; Appearing Courtesy Reuters.

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United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, appointed Costa Rican expert on climate change, Christiana Figueres, as the new U.N. climate chief on May 17th. She will replace Yvo de Boer as executive secretary of the United National Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) on July 1st.

De Boer, of the Netherlands, announced his resignation last February after the Copenhagen climate summit where 120 world leaders failed to come to a binding agreement on global warming.

Figueres, 53, is the first person in this U.N. position to come from a developing country. She has been a member of Costa Rica’s negotiating team on climate change since 1995. She represented the Caribbean and Latin American on the Executive Board of the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism in 2007, and from 2008 to 2009, Figueres served as vice president of the Bureau of the Convention.

Figueres said in a statement issued by the U.N., “I come to the secretariat with great respect for the institution and a deep commitment to the UNFCC process. There is no task that is more urgent, more compelling, or more sacred than that of protecting the climate of our planet for our children and grandchildren.”

When Figueres assumes her post on July 1st, it will only be five months until the next climate change meeting scheduled to take place this November in Cancun, Mexico. In an interview with Reuters, she said that crafting a new deal to fight global warming was not a priority for 2010, but that wealthy companies much first fulfill their pledges to provide financial support to aid climate change. Wendel Trio, Greenpeace’s climate policy coordinator, was quoted in an article in the Telegraph, noting that Costa Rica has already set an ambitious goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2021, with “the type of attitude we need on the global stage.”

A graduate of Swarthmore College with a master’s degree in economics from the London School of Economics, Figueres resides in the U.S. Her father, José Figueres Ferrer, served as president of Costa Rica three times.

Article by Julie Mitchell appearing courtesy Celsias.

photo: Steve Cadman

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Fifty-five major industrial powers that produce nearly 80 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions have submitted voluntary CO2 reduction targets, but a top UN climate official says they still fall short of what’s needed to limit future temperature increases to 2 C (3.6 F).

Meeting a Jan. 31 deadline established at the December climate summit in Copenhagen, the European Union set a goal of reducing emissions 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020; Japan pledged to slash CO2 emissions by 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020; the U.S. set a more modest target of reducing carbon dioxide emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020; and China vowed to cut the so-called “carbon intensity” of its economy — the amount of CO2 produced per unit of gross domestic product — by 40 to 45 percent by 2020.

Some conservationists hailed these targets as an important step in slowing global greenhouse gas emissions, but Janos Pasztor — the top climate advisor to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon — said that even with these voluntary reductions “it will still be quite difficult to reach 2 degrees.”

Meanwhile, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao reversed an earlier position and said he supports the ratification of a binding global agreement on CO2 reductions at the next major round of climate talks in Mexico City this December.

Article appearing courtesy of Yale Environment 360

photo: jovelstefan

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In the wake of a controversy over a dubious claim made about melting glaciers by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a top Chinese official says that the panel should include the views of global warming skeptics in its next report.

Xie Zhenhua, vice-chairman of China’s national Development and Reform Commission, told a meeting of rapidly developing nations that the IPCC needs to “adopt an open attitude to scientific research and incorporate all views.”

His comments came after the IPCC apologized last week for a faulty forecast in its 2007 report on global warming, which stated that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035. That forecast was based on a press interview with an Indian scientist, not a peer-reviewed scientific paper.

IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri said he will not resign over the glacier controversy and other recent criticisms of the IPCC’s methods. Meanwhile, the World Glacier Monitoring Service reported that many of the world’s glaciers, particularly those in lower-altitude mountain ranges, will disappear by mid-century.

The most vulnerable glaciers are in the Alps, the Pyrenees, Arica, parts of the Andes, and the Rocky Mountains in North America, the report said. The 96 glaciers monitored by the service lost an average of a half-meter in height, and 66 of the 96 glaciers lost mass overall.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

photo by overatli

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UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – Global investors representing $13 trillion in assets called on the United States and other countries on Thursday to adopt policies to fight climate change they said would unleash a potential flood of private money into renewable and efficient energy.

“Without policies that create a stable investment environment our hands are tied,” Anne Stausboll, chief executive of the California Public Employees Retirement System, a pension fund with more than $205 billion in assets, said at a meeting called the Investor Summit on Climate Risk.

“We are ready and willing to up the ante to finance the transition to a low carbon global economy but you need to have the courage to act,” said Mindy Lubber, the president of Ceres, a coalition of investors and environmentalists which was hosting the meeting.

More than 20 countries, including China and the United States, agreed to a non-binding Copenhagen Accord at a U.N. climate summit last month. They are hoping at least 100 countries sign on to the accord by pledging carbon cuts or action on climate in order to show the momentum needed to form a binding global agreement, a Western diplomat said.

But the United States, the world’s second-largest emitter, has not formed a national plan to cut emissions as climate legislation has stalled in the Senate. And major developing countries want the United States to act first before agreeing to take binding action.

Opportunities for investing in the low carbon economy have been proven, investors said. A Deutsche Bank report released on Thursday found companies that specialize in renewable energy like wind, solar and geothermal power and energy efficiency outperformed peers across the wider global economy last year and expected that to continue in 2010.

“Until the U.S. Congress passes climate regulation, America will be at a competitive disadvantage in the development of renewable energy and other climate change industries,” said Kevin Parker, the bank’s head of global asset management, which had $695 billion in assets as of September 2009.

Article by Timothy Gardner; editing by Todd Eastham; appearing courtesy of Reuters

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