Human Survival Depends On Shared Technology, Says New UN Climate Chief

In between climate change conferences, Christiana Figueres, newly appointed executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), was in Geneva yesterday to attend a ministerial meeting convened by the Swiss and Mexican governments on climate change finance.

On the side of the closed finance meeting, she gave a press conference on the state of climate change negotiations and said that there is a constructive atmosphere and a growing sense of urgency among governments about climate change mitigation. At Cancun, Mexico, where the sixteenth Conference of the Parties will be held from 29 November – 10 December, governments need to go from the politically possible to the politically irreversible, she said.

During the last meeting in Bonn, Germany, in June, Figueres said that countries decided that the “text before them is now a negotiation text,” and that it is now a “party text,” which shows serious commitment, she said. In addition, comments were heard from “very important countries” that their confidence and trust in the negotiation process was restored, which was not the case at the end of the 2009 conference at Copenhagen, she added.

The last meeting before Cancun, the fourteenth session of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP) and the twelfth session of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention (AWG-LCA), will take place from 4 – 9 October in Tianjin, China.

“From what we can understand, governments are contemplating a possibility of a set of COP decisions” in Cancun, she said, “with each of those decisions addressing one of the elements of the Bali action plan” [pdf].

“We would have a COP decision on the financing mechanism,” on a technology mechanism, on how to push forward reduction of emissions from deforestation, on adaptation, and on monitoring, she said. At Cancun, four or five decisions could be taken to establish the operational entities that would be the basis for the next chapter of the climate regime, Figueres said.

[Update:] Meanwhile, a government-led initiative,www.faststartfinance.org, was launched to track whether developed countries are living up to their promise to provide US$ 30 billion for the 2010-2012 period to support adaptation efforts in developing countries, which Reuters reported parties see as critical to the global talks.

Figueres also emphasised the need for technology improvements to mitigate the effects of climate change, saying that “survival depends on our improvement of technology.”

The issue of technology transfer and in particular of intellectual property rights on new technologies was intensely discussed at Copenhagen and at previous climate change meetings (IPW, Technical Cooperation/Technology Transfer, 19 December 2009), with intellectual property language being put in and pulled out of the negotiating texts.

The current negotiating text [pdf] for consideration by parties in Tianjin at the twelfth session of the AWG-LCA is available on the UNFCCC website. It includes reference to intellectual property in particular in Chapter IV: Enhanced action on technology development and transfer, and distinctly concerning the technology mechanism.