Commonwealth heads champion climate fund

South African President Jacob Zuma admits that before coming to Trinidad for the bi-annual Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), he met with its secretary general, Kamalesh Sharma, to discuss the relevance of the grouping in today’s evolving global power structure.

But at the end of their three-day meeting on Sunday, Zuma said, “I think some of my questions have been answered,” noting that the manner in which the summit dealt with the issue of climate change “indicates we are dealing with a CHOGM of today”.

The Port of Spain Climate Change Consensus that Commonwealth leaders adopted was reached at the end of a special meeting also attended by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen.

New financing

The Commonwealth is an association of mostly former British colonies in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.

Participants said they want the United Nations Conference on Climate Change, to be held in Copenhagen early next month, to address the urgent needs of developing countries by providing new financing, support for adaptation, technology transfer, capacity building, and incentives for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.

“We need an ambitious mitigation outcome at Copenhagen to reduce the risks of dangerous climate change without compromising the legitimate development aspirations of developing countries,” the declaration said.

“We stress our common conviction that urgent and substantial action to reduce global emissions is needed and have a range of views as to whether average global temperature should be constrained to below 1.5 degrees or to no more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels,” it said, in a tacit indication of the reluctance of some members to commit to deep emissions cuts.

Ban Ki-moon said his message to the world leaders ahead of Copenhagen is to remain focused and come to Denmark “and seal a deal…that is ambitious, a deal that is equitable, a deal that satisfies the demands of science”.

Sarkozy told reporters that there are seven or eight decisions that needed to be taken in Copenhagen and that all leaders should be present, especially on December 17-18 when final decisions would be taken.

“Let me tell you my deeply felt position, it is either we take all the decisions or we take none...because we need to strike the right balance,” he said.

Sarkozy’s brief visit stemmed from a climate change policy his country has adopted with Brazil ahead of Copenhagen summit.

The accord between France and Brazil emphasises the final objective of a global reduction of at least 50 per cent by 2050 of damaging greenhouse gases.

The French president said that the figures put forward by China were very promising, adding the “technical elements that we have show ...the emission reduction curve is very comparable to that of the United States and that of Europe”.

“This could be a solution for Europe if we decided to go even further than we have gone so far,” he said, adding that he had been given an assurance by the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that his country would not produce more carbon than the average carbon of other countries.