ZIEM urges donors to increase ‘green' funding

THE extreme weather and climatological changes happening around the world are having a profound impact on the population and the ecosystem, says the Zambia Institute of Environmental Management.

ZIEM chief executive officer Morgan Katati said the changes such as floods, heatwaves and droughts presented a vivid image of the direction the world was heading to.

Katati said it was important that developed countries deliver on their commitments to scale up finance, technology and capacity building so that developing countries could undertake actions to reduce their emissions as agreed in Bali.

"The United States for example have been conditioning discussions on legal form of Bali Action Plan on requiring symmetrical commitment by both developed countries and developing countries at the same time forbidding developing countries from requiring finances and technology to meet their obligations," he said.

Katati said the uncertainties surrounding the proposal of the new treaty by developed countries would mean that rich countries most responsible for the climate problem would only reduce their emissions according to their political expediencies at home and not according to the increasing dire scientific realities.

He said the reality was that the climate convention and Kyoto protocol that make up the existing legally binding climate architecture desperately need implementation and not replacing.

Katati said the developed countries appear progressive by asking for a legally binding treaty when the truth was that they were violating the current legally binding regime by shifting the goalpost agreed on the Bali Roadmap and reneging on the agreement for a second commitment period of the Kyoto protocol.

He said in addition, targets during the second commitment period of Kyoto protocol were expected to be in line with the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) recently released in its Fourth Assessment (AR4) report, in 2007, which was the available climate science.

Katati said developed countries were expected to honour their pledged quantified emission reduction commitment thereby reducing their emissions of greenhouse gases by at least 40 percent by 2017.

He said existing loopholes were expected to be closed up especially in the forestry sector to guarantee an equitable and appropriate level of domestic emission reductions.

Katati said it was important that the proposed operalisation of the green climate fund by Durban Climate negotiation outcome was treated with the urgency it deserved by the climate Subsidiary Body of Implementation (SBI).

The Durban negotiations under the Kyoto Protocol were focused on agreeing targets for the second commitment period for industralised countries from 2013 to 2017.