PGMA to reaffirm RP participation in UN negotiations for new climate change protocol

MANILA, Sept. 8 — President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is expected to reaffirm the Philippines participation in and commitments to the ongoing United Nations negotiations for a new climate change protocol.

The President is scheduled to meet this afternoon with Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) who is expected to brief her on the progress of the climate change negotiations.

Presidential Adviser on Global Warming and Climate Change and Philippines’ delegation head to the UNFCCC Secretary Heherson Alvarez said Yvo de Boer will arrive today in Manila.

Alvarez said the UN climate change chief will also discuss with the President how a new climate change protocol will affect the Philippines.

With only three months to go, world leaders from more than 180 nations will forge an agreement that will contain what may be mankind’s largest challenge in the 21st century — a new global treaty on climate change.

The United Nations climate-change conference is scheduled to be held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December. A potential successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012, it will attempt to hammer out a new international treaty to curb greenhouse-gas emissions.

At the Bonn meeting in June, developing nations demanded that rich countries agree to deeper emissions cuts and pledge fund to help poor nations adapt to climate change and pay for clean-energy technology.

Alvarez noted that member-countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) have agreed in principle to make a common stand to fight climate change, and have called for bold and significant cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions by developed countries.

“Science tells us clearly that we must stabilize global emissions within the next 10 to 15 years,” Alvarez said. After that “any remedy will become very, very expensive.”

The Philippines had earlier submitted a position paper asking industrialized countries to cut their CO2 emissions by more than 30 percent to 40 percent from 2013 to 2017 and by more than 50 percent from 2018 to 2022, using the 1990 levels as jump off point.

“The deep and early cut will moderate, if not avert, the increasing number of destructive storms brought about by global warming,” Alvarez added.

Alvarez also said the Philippines proposed two five-year commitment periods, from 2013-2017 and 2018-2022, and expressed flexibility and willingness to consider the proposal by the Alliance of Small Island States or AOSIS for a single five-year commitment period, but objected to an eight-year commitment period as being too long.

The Kyoto protocol, which took effect on February 16, 2005, is an international agreement that sets a target reduction of GHG emissions for 37 industrialized countries and European communities from 2008 to 2012.

Specifically, it requires an average reduction of five percent from the GHG emission recorded in 1990. To aid the countries in achieving their targets, the Kyoto Protocol allows “emissions trading” or the selling of excess allowable emission of carbon dioxide of a country to another country that is still behind its target reduction of GHG emission. (PNA)

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