In December, Trinidadian Kishan Kumarsingh will, together with the European Union’s Artur Runge-Metzger, lead an international working group tasked with the challenge of hammering out a critically-needed global agreement to address climate change.
Kumarsingh and German Runge-Metzger, co-chairs of the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform (ADP) at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (UNCCC), will play a pivotal role at this year’s Conference of Parties (COP 20) which will be held in Lima, Peru from December 1 to 20. They will lead negotiations for an agreement on the figures by which countries should cut their carbon emissions to decrease the impact of climate change.
The co-chairs were in Lima last week, along with participating country delegates, where they continued the process of putting together the necessary elements of the agreement for countries to begin taking action to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
Kumarsingh, who heads the Multilateral Environment Agreements Unit of the Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources, was elected along with Runge-Metzger for the ADP last year.
Their ability to manage the often volatile and challenging negotiations is of critical importance since many countries, including T&T, are already battling the effects of climate change.
Peruvian Environment minister Manuel Pulgar-Vidal said this COP20 cannot afford to fail and he expects that a formal draft agreement will be achieved in December. This draft will be taken to the Paris COP21 next year for a formal agreement.
The ADP consists of 296 parties, which is made up of 197 countries and the EU.
Climate change can no longer be dismissed as just scientific theory since it is a very critical reality for many countries, especially small island developing states like some in the Caribbean, fighting for their very existence. It is expected that these challenges will weigh heavily in discussions in Lima, Peru. The warming of oceans, sea levels rise and the global temperature increasing are creating problems for many countries and the minister said large countries must commit to assisting smaller countries in their mitigation and adapation efforts.
Pulgar-Vidal, addressing the opening session of a media training workshop in preparation for the COP 20 in collaboration with the COP20 secretariat and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) recently at BBVA main office, San Isidro, Lima, stressed the need for a global agreement at the conference.
He said the failure to make a formal agreement in December 2009 COP in Copenhagen cannot be repeated.
The impact of climate change, he said, is more clear now than in 2009. The urgent need for an agreement by global leaders cannot be denied, he stressed.
“Failure of the conference, at the negotiations is the failure of the planet. The planet will not hold one more time like it did in Copenhagen. The planet cannot hold another failure. We will reach an agreement, we have to hold to a common benefit,” Pulgar-Vidal contended.
He urged international and regional journalists present at the workshop to raise the level of awareness through their reports so the people most affected by the damaging impact of climate change will have a voice. Additionally, he said, more people will have a better understanding of what is being done to address their concerns.
Pulgar-Vidal said he is optimistic that the urgency of the problem of climate change will influence leaders to come to a formal agreement in Lima and then a further commitment in Paris in 2015 at the next COP.
He said Peru has taken a different approach to the COP and is confident of success.
Christiana Figueres, executive secretary UNFCC, in her video message address at the opening, described the negotiations as “complex and multifaceted.”
However she said too expressed confidence in the COP 20, since “the movement to address climate change has a human face unlike any other time in history.”
“People area affected in record numbers from megacities in the largest and most developed countries to the emerging economies looking to achieve full growth potential and to the small countries fighting for their very existence. And people are more aware than ever before about climate change, the grave danger it poses and the opportunity opened by transformational change to stable, climate-neutral growth,” she contended.
Figueres said the Lima draft, if reached, will go to cabinets and needs full ministerial support not just from Environment ministers, but health, transport, development and finance ministers.
She stressed the need for emissions reductions and adaptation actions (actions to mitigate the impact of climate change).
Dr Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the manifestations of climate change is “very clear” and are “largely because of human influence.”
He said the panel’s fifth report found that there is a “95 per cent certainty that human influence dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”
The world, he said, must commit to reduce emissions to ensure that the global temperature does not increase more than 1.5 or 2 degrees. He said many countries, especially, those in the Latin American region are already feeling the adverse impact of climate change.
He said to do nothing now will only serve to exacerbate the current climatic conditions.
What is climate change?
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) defines “Climate change” as “a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods.”
These changes are manifested through rising ocean temperatures (heating of the oceans’ water), melting of the ice caps and erratic weather patterns such as more intense hurricanes, rainfall etc.