EU/US : CANCUN CONFIRMS 'BOTTOM-UP' CLIMATE MODEL, SAYS WASHINGTON.

"Remarkably successful" is the United States administration's view of December's conference in Cancun, Mexico, on a new United Nations climate agreement. US Deputy Special Envoy on Climate, Jonathan Pershing, said Cancun had formally agreed a new structure that was first put together at the December 2009 Copenhagen UN summit. As a result, the 'top-down' model enshrined in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol would be replaced by a 'bottom-up' approach, where countries take on actions suitable to domestic circumstances, Pershing said, on 5 January, speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington DC.

Pershing predicted that 2011 would be a year of "figuring out the details". He did not expect countries to change the commitments they wrote down in early 2010, after being required to do so under the Copenhagen Accord. Different countries would therefore have different targets, using different baseline years, and some countries would adopt a target range - for example 20%-30% - instead of a single figure, he added. From the US viewpoint, this model was acceptable, he said, because it included commitments from countries responsible for over 80% of greenhouse gas emissions. He contrasted this with the Kyoto model, which "did not work" because so many countries did not have binding commitments, with the result that global emissions rose by 40% between 1990 and 2007.

Given this shift in model, Pershing doubted that Kyoto would be extended beyond 2012. He also doubted that a legally binding treaty would emerge at the December 2011 UN conference in Durban, South Africa. With major...