The Final Hours

As the U.N. climate change conference in Poznan draws to a conclusion, the EDF team has been scrambling to get copies of the final texts of agreements and analyzing results.

The EDF team’s view of the proceedings of the past two weeks:

Jennifer Haverkamp, director for international climate policy:

“Developing nations have just raised the bar for action. They’re fed up with the waiting game: Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, and Peru, to name some, have stepped up to the plate with proposals to lower their national emissions.”

EDF Team gathers

The EDF team plots strategy outside its cubicle in the Poznan convention center.

Annie Petsonk, EDF international counsel:

“We leave here with real momentum after that one-two punch, first the signal from Obama and then these developing country proposal. Obama asked for reports from Poznan, and we had more than 40 congressional staff here. That’s exactly the kind of engagement we need from the U.S. Congress.”

Steve Schwartzman, EDF’s expert on tropical forests:

“The deforestation issue is where developing and developed countries are coming together, even though negotiators barely managed to break the stalemate on technical details. We got a strong joint statement from 16 tropical and developed country ministers calling for early action to stop forest clearing, and Brazil committed to reduce its deforestation 70% in ten years.”

However, EDF said the overall results of the Poznan talks were “merely adequate” and called on world leaders to work harder to reach a shared agreement to stop global warming before temperatures rise 2ºC.

Haverkamp: “We got the bare minimum of what we needed from the talks.We got a clear mandate and timetable to go forward, but there’s a lot to do and less than a year to do it. The wait-and-see game must end.”

Richie samples local fare, Poznan

Richie Ahuja, EDF’s India project director, escapes the convention center to sample local fare in the old town square of Poznan.

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One Comment

  1. michelet
    Posted December 30, 2008 at 7:41 am | Permalink

    My take on Poznan is that it delivered much less than the “bare minimum” needed, and was light years below “merely adequate”. The UN adaption fund established by the “developed” nations to assist hundreds of millions of people in developing countries threatened by rising seas is expected to deliver 200-300 million dollars, while, according to an Oxfam rep at Poznan, the needs are estimated at 50-80 billion. One half of one percent of what’s needed to keep people from drowning is not a minimum but an insult. It’s even more of an insult compared with the 700 billion established by the U.S. to bail out its banks.

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