Latest update March 28th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jan 21, 2009 News
The Caribbean Community is preparing for the United Nations Climate Summit, which will be held in December in Copenhagen, Demark, when a “new Kyoto agreement” is to be finalised.
In 2012, the Kyoto Protocol to prevent climate changes and global warming runs out. As such, there is an urgent need for a new climate change protocol.
At the conference in Copenhagen, the parties of the UNFCCC meet for the last time at a government level before the climate agreement is renewed.
Caricom’s Director of Sustainable Development, Garfield Barnwell, said that at the last Caricom Heads of Government meeting in Antigua, a task force was established to prepare the Caribbean for the negotiating process, and to come up with some common strategic positions that the region needs to adopt in addressing the various issues that affect the region.
This task force is chaired by CARICOM Assistant Secretary General for Human and Social Development, Dr. Edward Greene, who, with the other members, constitute eminent scientists and experts on climate change from the Caribbean.
According to Barnwell, they had the first meeting in November 2008 in St. Lucia, and that meeting focused largely on the terms of reference of the task force and other urgent matters that would have been addressed at the recent climate change conference in Poland.
He noted that the climate change meeting in Bali, Indonesia, essentially kick-started the negotiating process for a post-2012 global agreement on climate change.
Barnwell said that the Copenhagen summit is supposed to be the end point with regards to finding a global agreement.
In Bali, he added, some ground rules were established with regards to what should constitute the deliberations for a post-2012 agreement, and there were some important areas outlined.
According to him, the important components were: the issue of mitigation and adaptation, which speaks to putting in place systems of governance to deal with the consequences of climate change; the issue of finance, for which the focus of attention was a broad range of measures and instruments to address the issue of technology transferral.
From a political standpoint, Barnwell said, the important issue that was decided on was the United States signing on and being part of any future protocols relating to climate change.
In Poland, at the most recent climate change summit, the objective was to look beyond Bali and try to look at the gaps that have to be addressed in moving from Bali to Copenhagen, and the focus of attention was to bring together all the proposals put forward by all the parties that operate under the umbrella of the United Nations.
This includes some 191 countries.
He noted that because of the change in the US Administration, everything was fast-forwarded to this year, so there will be a large number of meetings which will focus essentially on a range of political issues in terms of arriving at an agreement at Copenhagen.
Those meetings, Barnwell said, will begin as soon as February, and this would build up in terms of the text that would constitute the negotiating text for the Copenhagen summit.
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