UN Climate Change Negotiations 2012: Admitting to 20 years of mixed results, Doha agrees to fresh gas emission cuts

The two week long climate talks in Doha came to a close with 194 countries agreeing to implement a second phase of the Kyoto Protocol, from 2013 through 2020. The Doha round of talks mark the beginning of a transition to a new global climate change regime that will come into effect from 2020 and include within its ambit all countries.

Marked by a near total absence of an increased effort by industrialised countries to reduce emissions and paucity of funds to help developing countries to limit climate change, the Doha talks made an important shift by recognizing that 20 years of efforts to limit emissions and adapt to climate change had not been a success, as a result developing countries were experiencing loss and damage.

Opening up the possibility of rich industrialised countries compensating developing countries for losses due to climate change. This is perhaps the most important contribution of the Doha talks. A recognition that was hard won by developing countries and likely to be contentious in the years to come.

The outcome "Doha Climate Gateway" described as "historic" by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change executive secretary Christiana Figueres came 24 hours after the negotiations were supposed to come to a close on Friday evening. The delay was on account of countries like Poland, Russia, Ukraine andBelarus demanding use of the extra credit or assigned amount units commonly known as "hot air" that had been given to them in the first phase of the Protocol to deal with the breakdown of their industrial structure due to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

"Doha has opened up a new gateway to bigger ambition and to greater action - the Doha Climate Gateway.Qatar is proud to have been able to bring governments here to achieve this historic task. I thank all governments and ministers for their work to achieve this success. Now governments must move quickly through the Doha Climate Gateway to push forward with the solutions to climate change," said the conference President Abdullah bin Hamad Al-Attiyah of Qatar.

Figueres acknowledged that much more needs to be done to ensure that global temperature rise is limited to 2 degrees as required by science and to avoid a situation where extreme weather events become the new normal.

"Now, there is much work to do. Doha is another step in the right direction, but we still have a long road ahead. The door to stay below two degrees remains barely open. The science shows it, the data proves it. The UN Climate Change negotiations must now focus on the concrete ways and means to accelerate action and ambition. The world has the money and technology to stay below two degrees. After Doha, it is a matter of scale, speed, determination and sticking to the timetable," she said.

In the Qatari capital, representatives of nearly 200 countries brought to a close the five-year long negotiations on the Bali roadmap. Agreed to in 2007, the pillars of the Bali road map addressed emission reduction by industrialised countries that were not part of the Kyoto Protocol—United States; voluntary efforts to limit emissions by developing countries; adaptation to the impacts of climate change; finance and technology for developing countries, and capacity building. All outstanding issues will now be addressed as part of the new regime or by the permanent technical bodies of the Convention.

The Kyoto Protocol, the only legally binding agreement to combat climate change, requires industrialised countries to take quantified emission reduction targets.

Only Europe and Australia agreed to sign on for the second and final phase, accounting for 15% of global emissions. Last year, Canada withdrew from the Protocol, while Russia, New Zealand and Japan said that they would not sign on for the second phase. The 1997 iconic agreement will run till 2020. Together with the negotiations of the Bali Roadmap, the Kyoto Protocol formed the two-track global approach to limit climate change.

By bringing the existing two-track negotiations to a close, countries signaled that they were moving on to work on designing the new global climate regime they had agreed to in Durban in 2011.

Analysts and delegates had described the Doha talks as a "housekeeping Conference of Parties" and a "transitional COP" as it was meant to close down existing negotiations to move to work on the new regime. This meant that expectations from the Doha round were not very high. Nonetheless there was a sense of disappointment from the final outcome. "This is not perfect but it is a modest step in the right direction", EU commissioner for climate change Connie hedegaard said.