Poland: hero or villain on climate change? That will be the question for thousands of delegates at a series of crunch meetings on global warming in the next two weeks.
While many of the Polish government’s climate change experts will be in the western Polish city of Poznan, hosting the governments of more than 190 countries at UN talks on global warming, their colleagues will be hundreds of miles away in Brussels arguing for a serious weakening of the European Union’s climate change targets.
Both talks reach a conclusion at the end of next week, with the UN expected to set out a timetable and a skeleton framework for a new global agreement to replace the Kyoto protocol, which will be finalised over the course of a crammed year of negotiations before a final meeting in Copenhagen next December.
But the role of the European Union, which has long been the world’s most strident champion of drastic greenhouse gas emissions cuts, will be severely undermined if Poland, Italy, the Czech Republic and a handful of other member states get their way on watering down the bloc’s commitment to cut its emissions 20 per cent by 2020.
“It is highly ironic,” said one EU official of Poland’s stance. “But we are confident that we will have a deal in Brussels.”
The UN talks among environment ministers in Poznan mark the midway point of negotiations on a new framework to replace the Kyoto treaty, whose main provisions expire in 2012. UN officials say a new treaty must be signed by the end of next year to give countries time to ratify it.
Governments agreed at a meeting in Bali last year to embark on the two years of negotiations.
Progress has since been painfully slow, largely because other countries have been waiting for the end of the administration of President George W. Bush. Both candidates in this year’s presidential election pledged to join an international framework on emissions cuts, so negotiators knew that they could hope for greater co-operation from January 2008.
“No one will come out with their real negotiating positions [until the new president is in office],” said one UK official.
Several congressmen and potential advisers close to Barack Obama, president-elect, plan to be in Poznan, including Senator John Kerry and Al Gore, the former vice-president.
The US delegation was booed on the conference floor last year.
This year, the unofficial delegation is likely to be fêted – while the Polish hosts may find themselves cast in the vacated role of villain.
