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| A water harvesting model suitable for rural PNG conditions. This model is among many simple techniques developed by NARI to assist rural people to mitigate the impacts of climate change |
The two-week long Cancun talks attended by more than 190 countries negotiated at length to reach agreements on the best possible ways to cut carbon emissions.
Such attempts made at the end of last year in Copenhagen ended in chaos and there were fears that the Cancun talks could failed again.
However, after two weeks of negotiating, rich and poor countries agreed a compromise that will see all countries committed to cutting emissions for the first time.
The outcome of the talks was an agreement which aims to limit global warming to less than 2 C above pre-industrial levels and calls on rich countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions as pledged in the Copenhagen Accord and for developing countries to plan to reduce their emissions.
The agreements oblige rich countries to contribute $30 billion in new aid over the next three years, growing the fund to $100 billion a year by 2020, to a Green Climate Fund.
This fund would help developing countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate climate change induced incidents such as floods, prolong dry periods and other factors that are likely affected livelihoods of the global poor.
While all nations are obliged to reduce emissions, how much will global emission be reduced and by when are some unanswered questions that negotiators continue to push them around.
And many commentators are of the view that the ambitions to keep the temperature raise at 2C may be nowhere near to prevent disasters that are likely to occur across the globe.
Important decisions on implementation of the cuts of emissions, how this burden will be shared between developed and developing countries, and how all this will be enforced have been once again pushed back by a year.
All these are likely to be considered at the next round of negotiations scheduled for December 2011 in Durban, South Africa.
Developing countries including Papua New Guinea are required under the agreement to device plans to reduce emissions and see best to benefit from the Green Climate Fund.
PNG, for example needs to understand how we fit into such agreements as the issue of climate change is of paramount to over 80% of the six million plus people.
We need to understand what would be done to achieve the required rate of reducing emission and whether the funding available could cater of the expected cuts.
While it is not clear what exactly rich countries are targeting by establishing this fund, reducing or minimising deforestation is obvious.
But deforestation may not work well for many developing nations including PNG who depend on it for income.
Many participants have cited the Cancun Agreements concerning REDD (Reductions in Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) as another cause for optimism.
After all, deforestation causes roughly as many emissions globally as transportation does, and the Agreements pledge to give developing countries financial incentives to leave forests standing. If that has to happen, the incentives should march the likely income that would have come from harvesting forest.
Developing countries need to make a realistic approach to this and work out whether their expected income from harvesting forest can be compensated from the Green Climate Fund.
Such realistic figures could form the basis of negotiations and should help development of guidelines on how the fund is managed and disbursed.
In PNG, for example, it important that all concerned parties including resource owners should come up with plans to address the issue on hand.
Arguably the most important question left dangling after Cancun is the future of the Kyoto Protocol.
The advantage of Kyoto from a scientific perspective is that it imposes mandatory rather than voluntary emissions reductions, at least on rich nations; developing nations are exempted on the grounds that overcoming poverty must be their first priority.
Of course, the mandatory nature of Kyoto is precisely why the United States—alone among rich industrial countries—has refused to ratify it.
In Cancun, other rich nations signaled that they've had enough.
First Japan and then Russia and Canada announced they would abandon the protocol if other big emitters, the United States and China remained outside its purview.
The Cancun Agreements, however, may have opened a door to resolving this dispute, for they oblige all nations to reduce future emissions.
The challenge between now and next December in Durban is to translate that general principle into specific, proportional, binding targets for rich and poor countries alike and, much harder, generate the political pressure to compel national leaders to accept those targets.
PNG and other developing nations need to have an established leadership on climate change that is seen to be negotiating on their behalf at global forums like the Cancun talks.
Such leaderships are required as we need to play an active role in such talks as it stands us affect us all.
National Agriculture Research Institute (including other state agencies) and NGOs have developed initiatives aimed at increasing awareness, generation and adaptation of appropriate technologies to climate change, and reduce emissions.
With support from the national government, NARI is taking the lead in mitigating the impact of climate change on agriculture and food security.
All these initiatives and those of others need to be supported.
All concerned agencies need to come together and prepare PNG well to participate at Durban negotiations come December as the climate change scenario looks to be extremely dangerous and negotiations cannot go on forever.
In fact we shouldn’t be waiting so long to get started.
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