UNFCCC’s Yvo de Boer on Spanking
Just wrapping up several days of reporting from Point Carbon’s seventh annual Carbon Market Insights conference in Amsterdam, spending several afternoons in close quarters with carbon speculators, financiers, and UN regulators.
Yvo de Boer, the easily-quotable, outgoing head of the UNFCCC, participated in a Wednesday morning panel discussion on the state of international climate policy. Below are some excerpts from his remarks and from a press conference he held later in the morning.
Commenting on the outcome of COP15: “We are now in the situation where forty-three industrialized nations submitted their national targets and thirty-two developing countries have submitted national action plans, which they intend to implement in order to address climate change. Those industrialized countries together account for more than 80% of energy related CO2 emissions and that group of developing countries includes all the major developing countries in the world. In terms of political intent, expressed through targets and action plans, a very clear change of direction is now evident.”
The Copenhagen Accord, he said, therefore, represents “the writing on the wall that tells you we will be moving in a different direction.” Yet he acknowledge the lack of clarity about what the deal meant for carbon markets and investors in the renewable energy sector. “You could say we’re embarking on a journey […] but you don’t know what the destination is. You don’t know what the mode of transport is. And you don’t know what the speed of travel is because all of those things were not clarified in the Copenhagen Accord.”
He went on to say that a “critical issue” for moving forward on climate talks is to shore up commitments from rich countries to finance mitigation and adaptation in developing nations. Countering claims that developing countries are resistant to market-mechanisms he said: “There’s a huge suspicion on the part of developing countries that rich nations will try and escape from their public finance responsibility through the market. [… ]Their fear is that at the end of the day there will be no public finance or re-cycled poverty eradication money - nothing new and basically the markets will be left to pick up the bill.”
On why developing countries, particularly China, blocked developed countries’ commitment to reducing by 80% their greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century, he said: “[They] were not clear on what the consequence of such a target would be in terms of the carbon space that would remain available to them.”
Teresa Ribera Rodriguez, Spain’s Secretary of State for Climate Change, also participating in the morning panel, suggested that the process for achieving a climate agreement has become too unwieldy and that participants were behaving like children. De Boer responded: “There is no big mother, but I do believe the process needs a big spanking.”
Asked by a Bloomberg reporter during the Q&A if his departure for business giant KPMG represented a feeling that there is more power in addressing climate change in the private sector than in the public one, he said: “What I’ve consistently said [throughout his career] is that if we don’t bring the private sector to the heart of the debate, we’re not going to get to a solution. And I think that is still the core of the problem – that this is too much an inter-governmental process and not enough a dialogue with business. So I wouldn’t put it in the context of power. But if there’s anything I can do over the next couple of years […] to take public-private partnership and public-private dialogue to a deeper level […] that’s what I’d like to work on and it has nothing to do with power.”
Later, at his press conference, I asked him about the retrograde discussion of climate science in the U.S.: “I think one of the problems we’re struggling with – well especially in the United States – is that there is still a large lack of deep understanding amongst the population on the seriousness of climate change and on how climate change is going to impact them directly. And I think the challenge over the coming years will be to invest more in education and public information in order to get that kind of backing. […] It’s only if can convince [voters] that because of climate change that next meal may not come, or may come later – but will definitely be expensive – it is only when you reach that level of understanding that you will have the political support that every politician needs in order to move forward. So that is where education and public awareness is so critical.”
I’ll post early next week on the release of Point Carbon’s annual survey, including on the 28% of respondents who said they had witnessed fraud, embezzlement or corruption related to carbon offset projects in China.
