International climate talks are ‘on track’ – Harlan Watson

www.carbon-financeonline.com
29 October, 2008

Discussions on a new global agreement to tackle climate change should be completed in time to meet an end-2009 deadline, according to the US's chief climate change negotiator. In an exclusive interview with Carbon Finance last week, Ambassador Harlan Watson said the crisis in the global economy is "clearly not helpful" to negotiations, as it has pushed the climate issue down the political agenda and governments will have less money available. But he said there was still considerable interest at the highest political levels in addressing climate change.

Watson will lead the US negotiating team at the UN's climate change conference in Poznan, Poland, in December. This meeting will feed into a series of tough negotiations that will culminate in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December 2009, where a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol needs to be agreed in order to give national governments two years to ratify it, before Kyoto expires in 2012.

"It's considered by many observers that progress is slow, but it's the normal course of things. If you look back on the history of Kyoto, that was a two-year-plus process. Everything will undoubtedly come together at the end," Watson said. Poznan will see parties "delving for the first time into the shared vision" that came out of last year's talks in Bali, Watson said, and continuing to discuss the four building blocks of the new agreement: adaptation, mitigation, technology and finance. "We are going to be presented at Poznan with a compilation of ideas and proposals that have been received to date. Those will be further elaborated in Poznan," Watson said. He expected a draft negotiating text to be developed between Poznan and the first meeting of 2009.

Watson said it was too early to agree targets for reducing emissions and that the US would not make any international commitment until a domestic target has been established. But he expected the new president, whether John McCain or Barack Obama, to initiate domestic legislation involving carbon markets, once they take office on 20 January 2009. "I would expect the new administration to embrace a cap-and-trade system. So it is just going to be a matter of how long it will take to get through Congress," he said.

Problems in the global economy have raised concerns about progress on tackling climate change, Watson said. "The economy is going to be the focus of the new president and the world leaders for the foreseeable future. Quite frankly, the economy has buried everything. But there's still considerable interest in climate change, and energy security, which is closely aligned with climate change."

However, stretched by billion-dollar bank bail-outs, "there's general agreement that governments are going to be facing budget restrictions and the idea that governments are going to be able to come up with great sums of money [to address climate change] is not going to happen." Watson suggested that carbon markets might help fill that gap by encouraging the private sector to invest. "Most of the funding is going to have to come from the private sector in any event," he added.