Following the leads of the EU, US, Australia and Japan, New Zealand this week became the latest developed nation to announce a target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.
It will fall between 10% and 20% from 1990 levels - if the UN climate negotiations which are this week going through a relatively informal set of talks in Bonn result in a global deal.
As my colleague David Shukman reported from that meeting, significant differences remain between developed and developing worlds over who should shoulder how much of the pain of carbon cuts, and who should pay how much to the poorest countries projected to feel the impacts of climate change first.
Outside the confines of the UN process, other evidence is gathering that an ambitious deal looks unlikely when the final scheduled meeting of that process wraps up in Copenhagen in the middle of December.
New Zealand, although a modest emitter of greenhouse gases in global terms (it has but a modest human population, after all) is a prime exemplar of three reasons why.
Firstly, its emissions are significantly above the level pledged when it adopted the Kyoto Protocol. Its target was a zero increase; instead, emissions are 33% above 1990 levels, and it clearly isn't going to make it.
That's one factor behind its reluctance, just like Australia, the US and Japan, to make any big promises now - and that reluctance is the second reason why the prospect of large cuts in Copenhagen is receding.
The third reason is that in one sense all these pledges should logically stem from the UN process; they should all be honed in the negotiations that allow governments to judge what is in their best interests depending on what others are offering and demanding.
Instead they are being made unilaterally before the hard talk begins.
If all the developed countries draw their own lines in the sand, what prospect does that leave for meaningful negotiations?
Meanwhile in the US itself, signs are emerging that the bill projected to cut emissions back just beyond 1990 levels by 2020 may not sail through the Senate as its proponents had hoped.
Last week, 10 Democrat senators wrote to President Barack Obama [pdf link] indicating they would find it "extremely difficult" to support the bill unless it contained measures that would "maintain a level playing field for American manufacturers".
Interpretations of what the letter means vary between the New York Times, whose headline judged the senators as "threatening" the bill's passage, and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a prominent US campaign group that found it "constructive".
Whichever of those is correct in the context of US legislation, it's hard to see how the senators' move is constructive in any way at all for an international deal in Copenhagen.
It's basically putting yet more lines in the sand. They derive from US domestic concerns; and the US, whoever currently speaks for it, does not have a deep well of goodwill on which to draw within the UN process.
Then there's the timescale issue. The senators are demanding that US legislation contains measures that other countries might not find acceptable, and therefore that the US administration might have to concede.
So how sure do they need to be before supporting the bill? Will they need to see some wording agreed in the international talks before deciding?
Yet if there is no US legislation in place by Copenhagen, the prospects for an international deal recede.
It is a complex picture; and as we saw during the long years of turning the Kyoto Protocol into a practical set of rules and procedures, the more complex something becomes, the more likely it is that governments will insist on their own narrow demands being met.
Kyoto gained in little but modesty during that process; which surely makes speed a priority for anyone looking for something meaningful in Copenhagen.
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Wanted: Green spooks
Richard Black 13:54 UK time, Thursday, 30 July 2009
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Bored with the same old office nine-to-five routine? Looking for something a bit more unusual and - well - daring?
Happy if potential rewards include uncovering the latest Mr Big in the field of environmental crime?
In that case, a competition recently launched by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) might be worth a look.
Perhaps more than any other environmental group, EIA uses covert techniques (I could give the full details but if I did, I'd have to eat this computer) to uncover illicit acts.
Whereas Greenpeace marches into battle with flags hoisted, video cameras running and a banner reading "look at me!" to the fore, the EIA operative is more likely to enter in false moustache and dark glasses and emerge with some stealthy film that can be used in a court case or simply to expose something on the dark side of green.
One of the group's earliest successes involved filming an ivory carving factory in Dubai, which they suspected was also smuggling ivory into the state.
Operatives posed as a crew making a commercial film for the tourist industry, and were allowed access to the premises next door.
One of the team was eventually able to hide inside a cardboard box on a fork-lift truck. As it hoisted him off the ground, he was able to keep the camera rolling, eventually gaining a clear view over a partition wall into the ivory carving room next door.
Illegal forestry has regularly been a focus of the agency's operations. On more than one occasion, posing as timber buyers, staff have literally supped at the top table with some of East Asia's least scrupulous businessmen, gaining insights impossible to get from a more conventional distance.
The tactics have been used by other groups in similar fields, such as Global Witness, an NGO with a remit to link environmental wrong-doing with human rights violations and corruption.
But this sort of operation has become pretty rare in the environmental movement - partly, I suspect, because it's expensive and brings no guarantee of returns, but also because the nature of the big issues nowadays means there are often more effective if less exciting ways of obtaining the same information.
What's the point in illicitly filming what's being said during a cabinet meeting on climate policy - even if you could - when a nod, a wink and the price of a beer can get you the same information immediately afterwards for a lot less work?
Spies have come in from the cold.
The same trend, no doubt, is sweeping through journalism - across the board, including the environmental sphere.
Some leading UK journalists are so concerned about this trend that they recently launched The Investigations Fund, which aims to help reporters wanting to get undercover (with or without trilby hat) and research the kind of original story that needs a prolonged assault.
There's nothing like that - yet - in the campaigning sector. But there you are. If you're a would-be Woodwood or Bernstein with a greenish tint, or if you're the kind of activist who yearns for the old days of more direct action, why not have a look at the EIA's Experience Undercover competition and maybe win yourself a "spy camera" and a day working with the "professionals".
Just keep it under your hat if you're planning to enter...
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Tuna: Fin words, suspicious tail
Richard Black 12:41 UK time, Tuesday, 21 July 2009
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If you've read my previous posts on the plight of the Atlantic bluefin tuna, you might assume everyone would be gambolling with delight at the news that France and the UK are supporting calls for a ban on international trade in the species.
Think again.
Although on the face of it this is a move that could save the species from commercial extinction, there are some important questions.
Can it work? Is international trade the right point of attack?
Is this another case of governments seeking easy green points on things that are painless to them? And are we once again oversimplifying a complex environmental issue down to a totemistic, tokenistic posterchild?
The new forum for the tuna war is Cites, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. France and the UK are joining Monaco in saying they'll lobby for international trade in the profitable bluefin to be banned when the organisation meets next March.
Conventionally, Cites isn't used for commercial fish, and indeed at the last meeting in 2007 an almighty row erupted between Cites and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) about which was the competent body to regulate on these species.
The FAO argued that looking after food species was a job for Regional Fisheries Management Organisations (RFMOs) - in the case of bluefin in the Mediterranean Sea, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (Iccat).
During that meeting, the EU sought to ban trade in a couple of edible shark species - a move that was rejected by a bloc of countries including those which, like Japan, traditionally adopt a "pro-sustainable use" stance and which supported the FAO in its argument with Cites.
New Zealand's delegate Pamela Mace voted against the shark trade ban, because, she said, restrictions on international trade could not solve the problem: "It actually requires effective management at the local level."
The same argument, with some justification, will be made about the bluefin.
It's generally acknowledged that Iccat has failed to manage the Mediterranean bluefin effectively, which is why some, such as conservationist Alex Rogers, argue that Cites may offer the only option.
But who's to blame for Iccat failures? According to a coruscating independent report [pdf link] that Iccat was obliged to commission last year, it's the member states.
They have not backed fine words with enforcement, the report said, and at times have actively worked to help their own fishermen against Iccat regulations.
One would have rather more confidence that a country was serious about banning the bluefin trade through Cites if that country's authorities always inspected landings with missionary zeal and always prosecuted errant fishermen to the maximum.
And sometimes - as at last year's Iccat meeting - fine European words have evaporated under the heat of business-as-usual, with pro-fishing delegates taking a radically different negotiating position from the one implied by pre-meeting rhetoric.
By common consent, the biggest problem with the bluefin (as with many other fisheries) isn't inadequate regulation, but inadequate enforcement - mainly a job of national authorities.
The bluefin has become a symbol of the wider decline in marine ecosystems - in the UK it's received special attention since the release of the documentary The End of the Line, which you might term An Inconvenient Truth for the oceans.
Celebrities have threatened to boycott the fashionable Nobu chain of restaurants unless it takes bluefin off the menu, and the species' plight has been admitted to the select club of topics deemed suitable for conversation at dinner parties.
One suspects that political support for a Cites ban is largely based on a perception that it would be popular in dinner party-attending circles... and with tuna a species of virtually zero commercial importance in the UK, the support comes free of pain.
If you're of a cynical bent, you might contrast the support given for continued cod fishing - against scientific advice - with opposition to continued bluefin tuna fishing - in line with scientific advice.
"Iconisation" is something that happens in all environmental fields. Heathrow's third runway becomes a symbol of climate-unfriendly development, the Brent Spar a symbol of oil companies' disregard for the natural world.
The intent of those involved is often genuinely to raise awareness of the wider issue through publicising an icon that's easy to relate to.
The problem is, solving the narrow issue can suggest that the wider job is done; and anyone who thinks that preserving the bluefin means ocean health is solved is peering through the wrong end of the telescope.
The bluefin certainly needs a saviour, and it would be great to be wrong about the capacity of a Cites motion to swim into town on its white seahorse and sort the tuna issue once and for all.This may looks like a serious attempt to solve a pressing problem, but it carries more than a hint of window dressing.
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