http://www.environmental-finance.com/news/view/2066

 

A legally-binding post-2012 climate agreement is achievable, said the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Christiana Figueres - but not this year.

 

"I certainly think that a legally-binding agreement is achievable, but that is not what governments are moving toward in Durban," she told Environmental Finance, referring to this year's Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UNFCCC in South Africa, which runs from 28 November until 9 December.

Instead, Figueres said, governments will be looking at the possibility of a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol - the first expires at the end of 2012 -as well as elaborating on new emissions reduction targets made under the auspices of the UNFCCC. Then, she said, they could look at "how they would start a process toward a comprehensive agreement that they would work on over the next years".

This process would build "on the institutional infrastructure that they are putting in place", Figueres said. "It's a very different approach to what they've had in the past, because they are actually using the fact that they will have an institution in place for finance, one for technology deployment, one to give coherence on adaptation, they will have guidelines with respect to [monitoring, reporting and verifying emissions]," she said.

"There are 16 major economies that have national [climate change] legislation in place, the private sector is doing much, the investment sector is doing much - so it's actually building on all of these various building blocks, if you will, that they will move towards a broader and more ambitious comprehensive agreement."

Figueres added that the COP meeting could approve the foundations of some of these initiatives, which have arisen out of last year's COP in Cancún, such as the committee for the Cancún Adaptation Framework, to enhance action on adapting to the effects of climate change.