“There is no plan B. If we do not realise plan A, we go straight to plan F which stands for failure,” said Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjejiva. “The situation is a little desperate, and time is slipping through our fingers,” Brazilian Environment Minister Carlos Minc told AFP in an interview.
What is plan A? How long do we have to sort things out and stay out of danger? Difficult questions that are being tackled at multiple high-level climate change talks like the recent UN Climate Summit in New York, the G8 Summit in L’Aquila, and the G20 Summit in Pittsburgh.
Up until next week in Bangkok is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the second last session before COP15 in Copenhagen in December. Informally known as the Earth Summit, the UNFCCC treaty is an environmental treaty aimed at stabilizing green house gas in the atmosphere, to a level that will prevent interference with the climate system that is generated by human activities. It is also the parent treaty of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
Other than green-house-gas emissions, another critical problem is the public and private capital needed to move things forward. The UNFCCC has estimated that by 2020, the cost of alleviating us from and adapting to climate change will escalate to US$200 billion, and be US$100 billion per year. In addition to this, according to the IEA, public finance is crucial for mobilizing the estimated US$1.5 trillion in annual private sector investment needed to boost the clean energy economy.
How is this going to be made possible? During all these top-level talks between countries, has anything been agreed upon? Does everything rely on COP15?
One thing is for certain, nothing can be solved with COP15 alone. Improving the environment and progressing the renewable energy agenda is an ongoing challenge, and is not going to be solved overnight. We hope that WFES will ensure the dialogue is continued and further solutions found.
The World Future Energy Summit 2010 should not be only a platform for discussion, but also a real place where solutions will be taken further. Developed countries have a big role to play in terms of technology transfer and political decisions to take though!