The Future of Developed Country Commitments: Mitigation in the new LCA Text

by Trudi Zundel The new AWG-LCA text came out on Saturday, a bulky 130-page document that was to serve as a guiding tool for the high-level negotiations going on this week. The LCA, or Long-term Cooperative Action, is the negotiating track that runs alongside the discussion on the future of the Kyoto Protocol. Any "Durban Mandate" that comes out of this session will be based on the LCA...

Agriculture, Aviation, and Article 4.1.(c): a report-back from Sector Specific Approaches

by Trudi Zundel Yesterday Parties met for the first time to talk about cooperative sectoral approaches and sector-specific actions under the Working Group on Long-Term Cooperative Action. Sectoral approaches are simply work programmes that are specific to different sectors, like agriculture, aviation, or waste managment, for example. These sector-specific actions are supposed to "enhance the...

Climate-Stupid Agriculture @ the UNFCCC

by Trudi Zundel With food security threatened throughout the developing world, the global community has been paying a lot more attention to the effect of climate change on agriculture. More volatile weather patterns makes planning crop rotations difficult; higher concentration of rain patterns, whether dry or wet spells, means that fields either dry out or wash away--and farmers have little...

Post-2012 Climate Regime: How Much Worse Can it Get?

by Trudi Zundel The first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol will end in 2012. In anticipation of that ending, Parties have been discussing what form the new UNFCCC commitments will take. The first item on the table: will there be a second commitment of the Kyoto Protocol? Developed and developing countries have fundamentally different hopes for a Durban outcome. Developed countries are...