Climate change funding faces cloudy prospects
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Details of a massive transfer of $100 billion a year to cover the costs of global warming are being hammered out by officials from more than 40 countries meeting in Geneva 2 and 3 September. One of the few outcomes of the failed Copenhagen Climate Conference in December 2009 was a non-binding agreement by the rich world to fund the effects on poorer nations of climate change. The goal is to find long-term ways to cover those costs.
Delegates are haggling about the financing in an economic environment that is decidedly less promising than a few years ago. The European Union and the USA would prefer more funds to come from private enterprise; poorer countries are looking for transfers of public money, and expect massive increases in aid. Some want to reduce carbon emissions, others need the money urgently to mitigate the effects of dramatic climate change. The unusually heavy monsoon rains and the resulting flooding in Paksistan is just one dramatic example of the world’s changing climate.
Mexico hosts the next round of the climate change talks in November, and Switzerland has agreed to co-host this week’s more informal meeting on the various options open to countries. The talks are meant to find consensus on the contentious issues that caused the Copenhagen summit to fail. Emerging powerhouses like China, Brazil and India feel that a curb on their carbon emissions will stymie economic growth, and insist that the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere now were put there by the rich world in the past century and a half. Smaller and poorer nations, such as Bangladesh or Pakistan, are subject to the direct effects of extreme weather; island nations in oceans that may rise significantly as a result of melting ice caps are threatened existentially.
Links to other sites: Bloomberg, Federal Office for the Environment, Le Temps,
Finges/Pfyn forest, above Miege, canton Valais
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Seven new regional nature parks in Switzerland, five of which are in French-speaking areas, now have federal funding that will allow their development to go ahead. The parks cover some of Switzerland’s most beautiful semi-wilderness areas. Le Doubs, for example, has magnificent rivers, canyons, forest and waterfalls but tourism is little developed in the area. The regional park’s fund go to building an infrastructure that adds to the regional economy while protecting the natural environment.
The funding follows the approval of plans earlier in 2009 and negotiations between the cantons and the Federal Office of the Environment (FOEN), Bern announced 1 December.
The parks will receive federal funds worth almost CHF5 million until end 2011.
A regional nature park is one of several categories of park in Switzerland and is defined as “a partly populated rural area, characterized by high nature and landscape values, with buildings and installations that fit harmoniously into the landscape and sites of local character”.
The new parks in the Lake Geneva region include:
