Climate Action Network sets out demands

The Climate Action Network, representing 281 citizens groups from all over the world, has released a comprehensive statement on behalf of its 10 million members. The statement voices concern at the slow progress of the COP-4 negotiations and calls on industrialized countries to make domestic emissions reductions their top priority. The statement urges ministers planning to participate in the COP to, inter alia:

• Acknowledge that the emission reduction targets in the Kyoto Protocol are inadequate.

• Create an ad hoc international legal and technical experts group on compliance.

• Establish a set of prerequisites for each country before it is permitted to transfer or acquire parts of assigned amounts.

• Avoid using the CDM as a substitute for domestic actions by Annex I countries to make the necessary deep reductions in their emissions.

• Design the CDM to ensure that emission reductions in the host country are truly additional, by verification and by comparison with objectively and rigorously defined benchmarks or baselines, chosen to represent the high-performance end of current practice.

• Ensure that the Protocol does not lead to the life extension of operating nuclear reactors or to the construction of new ones and ensure that nuclear projects under the CDM and/or JI are prohibited by a Decision of COP4.

• Include international aviation emissions in Annex I Parties’ assigned amounts as a matter of priority.

• By COP-5, agree on a methodology to calculate the full climate change impacts by all IFI development lending and guarantees.

• Elaborate, at COP-4, mechanisms to promote, facilitate and finance the transfer of or access to environmentally sound technologies to developing countries, with a view to adopting a decision at COP-6.

• Ambassador Mark Hambley, U.S. Special Representative to the UN Commission on Sustainable Development and Special Negotiator on Climate Change;

• Melinda Kimble, Acting Assistant Secretary of State, Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs (OES);

• Dirk Forrister, Chairman, White House Climate Change Task Force.