DAVOS, Switzerland — The thick, heavy snowfall outside the World Economic Forum's annual meeting has not whitewashed fears about climate change, and its effects on the economy.
There is serious concern about how to keep the global economy moving forward while, at the same time, ensuring that denizens in the developing world are not denied any chances to better their lives without contributing to factors that have caused global warming.
On Thursday, Mexican President Felipe Calderon is scheduled to join Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change; Connie Hedegaard, the European Union's commissioner for climate action; and South African President Jacob G. Zuma in an hourlong debate titled "From Cancun to Durban: The Course for Climate Change."
It's a critical issue coming after global talks on a new climate pact escaped a train wreck last month in the Mexican resort town of Cancun, where nations agreed on a modest set of decisions that put the negotiations back on track after the bitterly divisive summit a year earlier in Copenhagen.
Those talks had exposed the rift between rich and poor nations on the fundamental question of how to share the responsibility of tackling climate change — chiefly curbing the emissions of heat-trapping gases from the burning of fossil fuels.
Copenhagen produced only a nonbinding accord with voluntary climate targets that wasn't even formally adopted by the conference.
At Cancun, nations brought those voluntary pledges into the U.N. process and established a green fund to manage the $100 billion a year by 2020 that developed countries have pledged to help poor nations cope with global warming.
"I think you could say that the international climate change process came off life-support in Cancun a couple of weeks ago, in the sense that new energy was injected into the process and some technological advances were made," Yvo de Boer, former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, told The Associated Press.
"But, we now really need to see at the end of this year in Durban how things are going to advance politically. For example, are we going to see a new treaty that embraces the United States," he said.
The fact that the conference accomplished anything at all was seen by some as its biggest achievement; failure would have raised serious doubts about whether the U.N. is the right forum for the climate talks.
But the ultimate goal of crafting a new global climate pact was put off till the next climate conference in Durban, South Africa, or beyond. The main issue that remains to be resolved is the legal status of such a treaty: Should the commitments inscribed in it be compulsory?
China and India oppose legally binding emissions targets, saying that would hobble the economic growth they need to lift millions of citizens out of poverty.
"For India and China I think our priority is development — at any cost. We can't let our people rot," Aditya Ghosh, senior co-ordinator for climate change at New Delhi's Centre for Science and Environment told AP Television News. "We can't compromise, sacrifice our development targets, development goals in a country when we have about 27 per cent people still under poverty line."
For its part, the U.S. says it would only consider binding commitments if China and India do the same. The U.S. and other Western nations are the biggest emitters, historically, but the growing power demands of developing countries mean they now account for more most of the world's current emissions.
After Cancun, U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern said Washington doesn't believe in a paradigm "where all obligations go to developed countries and none to even the major developing countries."
"I mean, 55 per cent of global emissions are already coming from the developing world. In the next 20 years, that's going to go up to 65 per cent," Stern told the AP.
The European Union, which has put forth the most ambitious emissions pledges, prefers a legally binding treaty that includes the major emerging economies as well as the United States. But the Europeans know that's a tall order for the next summit in South Africa.
"You have to be quite optimistic to believe that this problem will be solved entirely in Durban. The question is how far can you get down that road?" Anders Turesson, Sweden's climate negotiator, told the AP.
De Boer said that because of the economic crisis, "a lot of investment in the energy sector and industry slowing down. The question is now how are those investments going to pick up again? Are they going to take the carbon intensive route which could push greenhouse gas emissions up by 50 per cent, or are we going to take the green route which will push emissions down by 50 per cent — which is actually where science tells us we need to go."
Supporters of the U.N. process point to the advances that have been made on a voluntary basis.
Emerging economies like China, India, Brazil and South Africa have pledged to curb the growth of their carbon emissions by improving energy efficiency. That means they will take actions — like closing energy inefficient plants or expanding renewable energy — to reduce the amount of carbon released into the air for each unit of GDP.
"We used to have this debate about whether or not developing countries would take any steps to reduce their pollution. And now, we've got India, China, Brazil and Indonesia taking concrete steps to reduce their emissions and that opens up, I think, a bit more of a possibility of finding an international agreement," said Jake Schmidt, international climate policy director at the Natural Resources Defence Council.
South Africa, for example, has committed to reducing emissions by 34 per cent below "business as usual" — the scenario if no action is taken — by 2020 and 42 per cent by 2025.
But that's not going to be easy, considering the country's growing power demands. President Jacob Zuma has pledged that all South African households will have electricity by next year.
While some argue that South Africa could be a leader on the African continent in developing clean energy and exporting it, the country is also expanding old-fashioned, dirty technology.
Last year, it got a $3.75 billion World Bank loan to build Medupi, a six-unit, coal-fired power station in Limpopo Province that is the first of its kind to be built in South Africa in more than 20 years. The World Bank approved the loan despite criticism from environmentalists, saying it was trying to help South Africa achieve a reliable power supply and avoid shortages that led to blackouts in 2008.
Climate activists say the talks are moving too slowly, while the planet continues to warm, melting glaciers and raising sea levels that threaten island nations and other low-lying areas. Global temperatures have climbed steadily in recent decades, and last year tied 1998 and 2005 for the warmest on record, the U.N.'s weather agency said last week.
Most atmospheric scientists attribute the change to carbon dioxide and gases released into the air by gasoline-burning engines and other industrial processes. The gases tend to trap heat in the atmosphere like a greenhouse.
The U.N. Environment Program says that even if the most ambitious climate pledges currently on the table are fulfilled, that would go only 60 per cent of the way toward keeping global temperatures from rising below a dangerous 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) above preindustrial levels.
___
Ritter reported from Stockholm, Sweden. AP Television Senior Producer Vineeta Deepak in New Delhi, India, and AP Video Producer Kristine Kelleher in Washington contributed to this report.
