1/27/11, "Ban Ki-moon ends hands-on involvement in climate change talks," UK Guardian, Suzanne Goldenberg
- 'UN secretary general will redirect efforts to making more immediate gains in clean energy and sustainable development'
In a strategic shift, Ban will redirect his efforts from trying to encourage movement in the international climate change negotiations to a broader agenda of promoting clean energy and sustainable development, senior UN officials said.
The officials said the change in focus reflected Ban's realisation, after his deep involvement with the failed Copenhagen summit in 2009, that world leaders are not prepared to come together in a sweeping agreement on global warming – at least not for the next few years....
- The view from UN headquarters will likely dismay developing countries who fought hard at Copenhagen and last year's summit at Cancún for countries to renew their commitments to the Kyoto protocol in just that type of grand deal.
UN officials say Ban will no longer be deeply involved in the negotiations leading up to the next big UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, meeting at Durban in December 2011.
"He will continue to encourage leaders to aim for a higher level of ambition but there will need to be less day-to-day stuff," said one UN official. ...
Ban will focus on broader issues of sustainability, which will be in the spotlight at a summit in Rio de Janeiro in 2012, marking 20 years since the first Earth summit.
"Because the circumstances have changed, the nature of his engagement is changing," Orr said. "The relative balance of his time is
- shifting towards getting it done on the ground out there."
UN officials, and those who closely track climate change negotiations, insist that Ban has not lessened his commitment to finding a solution to climate change. Ban has called global warming "the greatest collective challenge we face as a human family"....
However, they say he now believes there are more immediate gains to be made in mobilising international finance to support a green economy in developing countries than in trying to persuade world leaders to commit to deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
Others inside the UN system as well as in world capitals have been circling towards a similar conclusion as Ban: that gains in clean energy technology and energy efficiency could do more in the near future to reduce emissions. They could then drive the overarching deal that the UN still sees as necessary....
Meanwhile, he (Moon) is in the course of expanding his advisory team on sustainable development to about a dozen people ahead of the Rio meeting.
"The things that are moving faster are the investments in renewable energy, the kind of actual investments and changes on the ground that will make a difference," said Tariq Banuri, director of the division of sustainable development at the UN's department of economic and social affairs. ...
The strategic shift by the UN secretary general in some ways mirrors thinking in Washington,
- where environmentalists are looking at how to many progress on climate change without votes in Congress or the regulatory help of the Environment Protection Agency (EPA)....
The first public indication of a shift in direction was delivered in a speech to the UN general assembly on 14 January, in which
Ban ranked sustainable development as the lead item on his agenda for 2011,
- ahead of climate change,
human rights, security and humanitarian aid for Haiti."...
via Tom Nelson
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