POZNAN, Poland — The 14th Conference of the Parties (COP) organized by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change opened here last week and will last until Dec. 12. The last two days are expected to be spent by ministers from over 180 countries in hard bargaining. All told, around 9,000 delegates and staff were expected to have descended on this small but picturesque city of about 700,000 people in western Poland in hoary winter weather, blocking out all the hotels.
Prior to the conference, few in the outside world knew of Poznan. Folks back home thought I was going to Potsdam in next door Germany, famous for a treaty forged in World War II. We have heard of Poland’s capital, Warsaw, the most destroyed city in that war, and of Czestokowa, home of the Black Madonna from the 12th century and revered by the late Pope John Paul II, and his village hometown near Krakow in the south. Recent history speaks of Gdansk in the north, where Lech Walesa and the Solidarity Movement helped overthrow the communist regime. But Poznan was obscure, until climate change invaded it.
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The Poznanites are quite excited being thrust onto the international stage and the city has laid out the red carpet for the delegates. Among those expected here are US Sen. John Kerry, representing President-elect Barack Obama and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Buses, trams and subways give free rides and the museums, palaces, etc. have opened their doors. Tourist information offices in train stations, airports and major attractions are manned by English-speaking student volunteers. City folk are eager to help in restaurants, so that we get to savor their typical cuisine, homegrown vodka, etc. Their only complaint is that while they have heard of 9,000 delegates, they don’t see much of them. But they are inside the vast convention complex, working hard to try to save a beleaguered planet by wading through a huge alphabet soup bowl of acronyms! I joked to some locals that the huge hall converted into a cloakroom now looks like a big flea market.
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Poznan has acquired new urgency. It hosts the 14th of the long string of Conference of the Parties since the Kyoto Protocol was approved in 1997. With the first commitment period under this protocol, which calls for an initial 5-percent reduction in carbon emissions from the signatory nations, expiring in 2012, new negotiations have to be undertaken by the UNFCCC, the regulatory agency on climate change set up in June 1992 by over 150 nations, including the United States, for the second commitment period covering 2013-2017. The UNFCCC has set the big conference for December 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark.
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The special significance of the 14th COP at Poznan is that it seeks to negotiate a post-2012 agenda to address climate change and ensure an agreed outcome in Copenhagen. The feeling is that now is the time to draw together the advances made in 2008 and move from a discussion mode to a negotiation mode as Copenhagen approaches. Poznan is regarded as the halfway mark in the two-year negotiation process on an ambitious and effective international climate change deal hopefully to be clinched in Copenhagen. But considering that it took nearly eight years from the time the Kyoto Protocol was agreed before it came into force, any new deal could conceivably take some more debating in perhaps a few more conferences.
Yvos de Boer, UNFCCC executive secretary, on whom the Philippine delegation head, Presidential Adviser on Global Warming and Climate Change Heherson Alvarez, paid a courtesy call last Saturday, said in a statement issued at last month’s Carbon-Cutting Congress vs. Climate Change (CCCvs.CC) held in Malacañang: “At Poznan it will be essential that ministers give a strong political signal on a shared vision of how actions by industrialized and developing countries can work together in the long term and generate meaningful solutions. Crucially, this needs to include both the financial architecture and the types of mechanisms needed to generate additional resources.”
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What also makes the Poznan conference crucial is that there’s a feeling among nations that not only has the Kyoto Protocol failed to compel signatory nations to enforce by 2012 the agreed-upon five-percent emission reduction on the developed countries’ 1990 baseline (the CCCvs.CC manifesto terms it “despairing”), but also that the scientific world’s more ambitious target of a 50-percent emission reduction by 2050 cannot be met at the rate the signatories are trying to comply with the 5-percent rate. Scientists now think that even this 50-percent target is becoming woefully inadequate, given the strength and perniciousness of natural calamities triggered by global warming in recent years.
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Alvarez stressed that, based on the Fourth Assessment Report issued in 2007 by the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world is moving closer to the “tipping point” of 450 parts per million (ppm) in emissions, with its current level of 372 ppm. If the 450 ppm level is breached by 2050, the world would reach the point of no return.
But Alvarez also noted that US President-elect Obama was recently quoted as committing under his “New Energy for America Plan” his campaign promise to reduce emission by 80 percent by 2050. This is a marked contrast from the refusal of the outgoing Bush administration to even just sign the Kyoto Protocol, fearing its adverse effects on the US economy. If Obama were to honor his commitment, said Alvarez, it would produce a “domino effect” on industrializing nations such as China and India, as well as the European countries, and make them follow suit. Sources say President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo also leans toward an 80-percent reduction, which is a great idea.
