Photo: Gretchen Weber

The UN climate talks in Cancun finally closed in the wee hours of Saturday morning with an agreement that doesn’t set new limits on greenhouse gases, but does move the discussion forward in key areas, such as funding to help developing nations deal with climate change and broad plans to reduce emissions by slowing deforestation in tropical areas.

Elliot Diringer, Vice President for International Strategies at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, called the Cancun talks “the most tangible progress in the UN climate talks in years.”

Perhaps the most important thing to come out of the talks was that they seemed to have salvaged the UN process itself.  Expectations were low for Cancun, and in the halls throughout the conference, there was ongoing speculation that perhaps the problem of climate change is just too complicated to expect all countries to agree on solutions.  But early Saturday, every country except Bolivia signed onto the new agreement, many betting that some progress was better than none.

“Countries that before insisted on binding-or-nothing were willing to declare a package of incremental steps a major success – if for no other reason than to keep intact the process they desperately hope will deliver much more down the road,” wrote Diringer in an email to reporters.

Trust was in short supply after Copenhagen, which ended with the Copenhagen Accord, an agreement written outside the formal UN process and created behind closed doors with just a few countries, including the United States, at the table. In the end, the full conference voted to formally “take note of” the accord, not quite a ringing endorsement.

Rumors circulated repeatedly in Cancun about “secret texts,” which the Mexican government took pains to refute. Patricia Espinosa, the minister of foreign affairs for Mexico and president of the convention, repeatedly stressed the importance of transparency, earning her several standing ovations during the final sessions.  As Bryan Walsh notes in his informative “Five Lessons to Learn from the UN Cancun Climate Summit” post at Time.com, “Just about every country other than Bolivia seemed to leave reasonably happy.”

The web is flooded with commentary about the Cancun talks, but here are a couple suggestions for getting up to speed.  Sunday’s Los Angeles Times had a good  front-page article about the outcome of the talks, and Mother Jones has a comprehensive piece cataloging various immediate reactions to it.  There’s also this “reality check“  from Marc Gunther, which makes the point that while all this “groundwork” is being laid, emissions continue to rise.

Coming into the conference, one of the most hopeful areas for consensus was an agreement on “REDD+”, a strategy for reducing emissions from deforestation, which accounts for between 12% and 17% of global greenhouse gas emissions.  While it does start the process for an international system for REDD, the “Cancun Agreements” punt the hard work of figuring out the details to next year’s conference in Durbin, South Africa.  As I explain in my radio piece for The California Report, California is already moving ahead with plans of its own on this front, through agreements with provinces in Mexico and Brazil.

Photo: Gretchen Weber.

Chanting the Spanish equivalent of “The fight continues!”, hundreds of protesters made their way through the streets of downtown Cancun Tuesday, to call for dramatic action on climate change.  Located about an hour by bus away from the Moon Palace where the UN talks are being held, the procession brought together climate activists from around the world, members of Mexico’s indigenous communities, and dozens of journalists eager to report on one of the few major protests at COP16.

Coordinated by a network of climate groups who dubbed Tuesday a “Global Day of Action – 1,000 Cancuns,” the march was timed with demonstrations around the world, including one in San Francisco.  In Cancun, the marchers chanted, sang, beat drums, and danced in the streets, called for workers’ rights, protested inaction on global warming, and in some cases, denounced capitalism.

“We’re marching for life, and for social and environmental justice,” said Sara Mersha of the group Grassroots Global Justice for All. Mersha came down from Boston. “Because we want folks who are negotiating the COP to know that we support people solutions for climate justice, and we don’t support false solutions like REDD or the carbon market.”

REDD is the acronym for a deforestation-reduction mechanism that has become a major topic here at COP16.  The scheme has not yet been worked out, but generally, it involves payment for developing nations not to burn their forests and carbon offset credits for companies in the developed countries.  Many inside the Moon Palace think REDD could be one of the few areas where serious progress could be made this year toward an international climate deal.

Nonetheless many marchers in Cancun on Tuesday wore or carried signs that said, “No REDD.”  Opponents fear that REDD programs will drive indigenous peoples off land where they have lived for generations.

Meanwhile in San Francisco, locals gathered outside a Mission District parking lot that the city is planning on transforming into affordable housing and a community garden.

“Communities have the solutions in their hands, from urban gardening, to providing food for their communities, to protecting local water resources, to creating energy alternatives,” said Ananda Lee Tan, a coordinator for the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, one of the groups participating in the Global Day of Action. He echoed the sentiments of the Cancun protesters, adding that the reason for the Mission District rally was to “demonstrate local community opposition to the corporate destruction of this planet through climate change.”

US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu appeared to pull some punches while speaking at the US Center in Cancun on Monday. (Photo: Gretchen Weber)

The UN climate negotiations in Cancun may be the official attraction, but in many ways, there’s just as much happening at the “side events” here at COP16.  There are dozens everyday — last week there were more than 150, and that number is increasing this week as more people arrive for the final days of the talks.  While the negotiations are limited to representatives from national governments, the side events provide a stage for non-governmental organizations (NGOs), scientists, business leaders, and local and regional government officials, many of them, it turns out, from California.

On Monday, US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, (former head of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab) took the stage to talk about emissions reductions in the US at the national level, and raising eyebrows in the room by taking no questions.

Earlier Lauren Faber of the Cal-EPA spoke on a panel about what California is doing to reduce emissions, highlighting the defeat of Prop 23 (which got a round of applause from the international audience of about 150), California’s efforts to implement a cap-and-trade system, and the state’s vehicle emissions standards, which served as a model for the new federal rules.

Neither talk broke any new ground. In fact, I’d already heard much of Chu’s talk at Stanford earlier this year. He predicted increases in the cost of oil and warned that the damage now being inflicted on the planet won’t be felt for 100 years.  Here in Cancun, however, he left out much of the “call to action” that characterized that Stanford speech, opting instead to catalog many of the clean energy tax incentive and R&D programs that the federal stimulus package has funded in the US, under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Over the weekend, I attended the first-annual Gigaton Awards, which was hosted by Sir Richard Branson’s Carbon War Room and by the Gigaton Throwdown, a group founded by San Francisco-based clean tech investor Sunil Paul that “encourages entrepreneurs, investors and policy makers to grow companies that stabilize the climate.”  Awards were given in five categories to companies that had made significant cuts in their own emissions, and, depending on the category, on the influence their products have had on outside emissions.

None of the winners were from California, but the Golden State was well represented at the awards dinner.  Attendees included executives from HP, Google, and Hara, a San Mateo-based company that develops software for energy-and-carbon-accounting.

While the side events allow regional governments and businesses to share ideas and celebrate what they consider their achievements, they’re also a venue for organizations and scientists to raise awareness about issues they think are not getting enough attention.

Tony Haymet, director of the Scripps Institute for Oceanography was doing just that on Friday, across the lawn from the UN negotiations at a briefing about ocean acidification.

“Sometimes I feel the science that’s talked about here is from 1965,” he said, adding that the word “ocean” is  barely mentioned in the UN climate change negotiating documents.

“This is sort of the tyranny of the atmosphere here at the climate talks,” he said.

Haymet says that because CO2 in the atmosphere “inevitably” dissolves into the ocean, the amount of carbon in the ocean has increased by 30% over the last 150 years.  This change in ocean chemistry is harmful for organisms that rely on their calcium carbonate shells.

“If we persist in putting CO2 in the atmosphere and then in the ocean, eventually those organisms won’t be able to make their shells at all,” he said, which would destroy coral reefs, disrupt ocean food chains, and have negative consequences for the world’s commercial fisheries.

“We’re trying to raise a red flag that CO2 has another bad effect,” said Haymet.  “The conclusion of all this is very simple.  We just have to make electricity without making CO2.”

Map of Mexico created with Google Earth Engine, by scientist Matthew Hansen and CONAFOR. Google says this is the finest-scale forest cover map produced of Mexico to date.

This week in Cancun, in a jungle-themed conference room with green lighting and an audio track of rain forest sounds, Google launched a new technology platform designed to help scientists — and ultimately developing countries — monitor deforestation. Google Earth Engine combines LandSat satellite imagery from the last 25 years (much of which was not previously available online) with analytical tools provided by scientists, which will allow users to make fine-scale maps.

Greg Asner of the Carnegie Institute at Stanford is one of Google’s partners in the project. His lab provided some of the algorithms built into the Earth Engine that will allow users to analyze the satellite data online.

“There have been two major bottlenecks in helping people to map and keep track of deforestation and degradation: getting access to the satellite data and making it user-friendly,” said Asner.

Scientists used to pay dearly for satellite images. Matt Hansen, a remote sensing scientist at South Dakota State University who created a map of Mexico (shown above) using Google Earth Engine, said that just two years ago, accessing the 53,000 images he used to create the map would have cost $32 million dollars. “But now, we just did it in our spare time this past weekend, for free,” he said.

That’s because two years ago, the USGS started providing its satellite imagery at no cost.  But even though they were free, Hansen said, they weren’t readily available until Google, with it’s massive storage capacity, loaded them all online.

Rebecca Moore, manager of Google Earth Engine, presenting on Thursday in Cancun. (Photo: Gretchen Weber)

Now they are accessible, and by pairing them with tools for mapmaking and analysis provided by labs like Asner’s, Google Earth Engine will allow countries to monitor and measure their forest cover on an ongoing basis, at no cost.

Hansen said that it would have taken a single computer years to create the Mexico map.  But by harnessing the power of a thousand computers at Google, it took just one day to generate the map.

Google.org is donating twenty million computing hours to ensure that the technology is available to all scientists and governments. According to the company, ten million CPU-hours is enough to make 1,000 maps like the one Hansen made of Mexico, which reveals the forest cover of the entire country down to a scale of 30 meters.

Here at the UN climate talks in Cancun, it’s clear that there is a growing demand for effective methods to monitor forests.  One of the biggest topics on the table here is REDD, which stands for “Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries.”  Deforestation is a major source of global greenhouse gas emissions (estimates range from 12 to 20%), and many see it as low-hanging fruit in efforts to reduce global warming.

There are more than 30 models of how REDD could work, put forth by different countries, but the general approach is to pay developing countries to stop cutting down their forests. Currently, REDD pilot projects tend to be funded by foundations, corporations, and governments, but ultimately many of the plans call for the payment to come in the form of carbon credits. Because trees store CO2, the idea is that in a cap-and-trade system, corporations could purchase offsets to meet some of their emissions reductions goals.

The state of California is currently exploring potential REDD projects with Brazil and Mexico.

While many see REDD as a positive step, and one that looks relatively promising in the ongoing negotiations, not everyone agrees that it’s a good idea.  Some argue that it would encourage land grabs and embezzlement and thus harm indigenous people who rely on the forest.  There are also those that disagree with offsets in general, arguing that they could allow developed countries to skirt their obligations to reduce emissions at home.  And there are questions about measuring the amount of carbon stored in a forest and verifying whether or not a project is actually preventing deforestation.

Here’s where Google Earth Engine could play a role, said Peter Holmgren, Director of the Environment, Climate Change and Bioenergy Division of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.

“Of course it [Google Earth] will be useful for the countries that choose to use it,” he said. “REDD will depend on effective monitoring systems in all the developing countries that want to participate in REDD.  The availability of more standardized data, more accessible data from remote sensing will be crucial.”

Google is working with the Surui tribe in the Amazon on a pilot project to monitor forests on the ground, in addition to monitoring from satellites above.

The original version of this post misstated the number of CPU hours Google is donating to the project. Google is donating twenty million CPU hours over two years, not ten million CPU hours as previously stated.

COP16 attendees waiting in line for the UN bus (Photo: Gretchen Weber)

For a conference aimed at lowering the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, COP16 sure looks like it has big carbon footprint.  Just the air travel alone for the thousands of people coming to Cancun from literally all over the world is a huge source of emissions.  But once you get here, the excess emissions continue.  Cancun’s hotel zone is one long line of huge beachfront resorts boasting luxury accommodations, all-you-can-eat buffets, and — in the case of my hotel — giant jacuzzi tubs in every bedroom, despite the sign on the bathroom sink suggesting that guests remember to conserve water.

Fortunately (or unfortunately), there isn’t really time for taking baths in enormous tubs, because attendees must spend so much time on the road.  Special UN buses are shuttling people back and forth between the Hotel Zone and the negotiations constantly, commutes made more arduous and carbon-intensive by the added miles and long circuitous routes the buses have to make due to security.  Most of the hotels are located north of the negotiations, but security to attend them is located to the south. Therefore, attendees must first travel south, then north (up the same road) to get into the conference.   A common conversation on the buses is wistfully recalling how wonderful it was at COP15 last year, when attendees could simply take public transit (or walk through the streets of Copenhagen) to reach the talks.

At least the long intervals spent standing in line at bus stops provide a chance to warm up in the hot sun and recover from the Arctic conditions inside the conference centers.  Despite the fact that attendees were encouraged to “dress down” this year: traditional Mexican shirts for men and cotton dresses for women, so that the venues could save emissions with less air conditioning, many of us are wearing jackets and sweaters inside the venues.

One journalist described this year’s conference to me as “an island within an island.”  Military blockades have closed roads at various points, diverting local traffic.  Because of the geography, it would be very easy for people to come to COP16 and never actually see the town of Cancun, which, is a far cry from the Hotel Zone.  There’s a sharp divide between rich and poor here, with the opulence of these resorts just a few miles from abject poverty — which may be a fitting metaphor for the climate talks themselves.

Rich nations and poor ones are, in many ways, lined up on opposite sides of a fence as they sort out how to level the field.  Last year, as part of the Copenhagen Accord, a coalition of developed nations, including the United States, agreed to provide funding to help developing nations deal with climate change: $30 billion by 2012 and $100 billion by 2020. A major issue at this conference is working out how to allocate this money. While much of that money has been pledged, much of it has yet to materialize.

While the United States is moving forward with building and solidifying the Copenhagen Accord, according to chief negotiator Johnathan Pershing, some people (and nations) are concerned that this path will not be enough to stop the Earth from warming to dangerous levels. Even UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres, who heads the UN climate effort, said on Monday that if all the emissions-reduction promises made in the Copenhagen Accord were delivered, the world would be on track for warming more than the two degrees Celsius that the accord was designed to meet.

On Tuesday night I attended a community prayer vigil in downtown Cancun.  There were about 200 local people from different denominations, including Pentecostals and Catholics, gathered to sing songs and say prayers for the Earth.  Victor Menotti, head of the California-based International Forum on Globalization described the Copenhagen Accord as a path to “collective suicide.”

“The Copenhagen Accord doesn’t get us what we need in terms of emissions reductions, financing, and technology transfer,” he said. “All it is, is a collection of voluntary pledges that don’t add up.”

Photo: Gretchen Weber

After the hype and subsequent disappointment surrounding last year’s UN climate talks in Copenhagen, which failed to produce binding global agreement on emissions reductions, the expectations for this year’s talks, which open in Cancun, Mexico today, are much more modest.

“We’re not going to get a global, legally binding deal at Cancun,” UK Prime Minister David Cameron announced at the Governors’ Global Climate Summit at UC Davis earlier this month. “We’ve got to make it a staging post toward that deal.”

Rather than focusing on a comprehensive binding agreement, negotiators will likely focus on technical steps that could pave the way for a final deal at next year’s talks in South Africa, when the Kyoto Protocol expires. Those might include financing for developing nations to deal with climate change; setting standards for measuring, reporting, and verifying nations’ greenhouse gas emissions; and tackling emissions from deforestation.

Meanwhile, California is moving ahead with its plans to organize a network of sub-national cooperation, called the R20, which Governor Schwarzenegger announced in Copenhagen last year and officially launched at his summit in Davis two weeks ago.

“As a binding international agreement remains elusive, we know that there’s a lot of work that can be done at the sub-national level,” said Cal-EPA Secretary Linda Adams, who will be in Cancun promoting R20.  “In fact the UN itself says that up to 80% of all mitigation that will be required to keep the Earth’s temps stable will be done at the sub-national level.”

That work will primarily focus on organizing regional and local governments around to world to work together on clean energy projects, said Terry Tamminen, the former Cal-EPA chief who is currently leading R20 efforts.

“Basically our main purpose [at Cancun] is simply to say to them ‘Look, you’re not the only ones in this game, and we know you’re all frustrated because you haven’t been able to reach a successor agreement to Kyoto, but we at the subnational level are here to help. We’re going to be this bottom-up, even as you continue to try to get the top-down agreement and we’ll be waiting for you, whenever you show up,’” said Tamminen.

Over the last year, R20 has grown to include 69 governments and organizations, and Tamminen said he expects 100 members by the end of the year.  He said he’ll spend the next few months recruiting members, organizing structurally as an organization, lining up financing, and identifying projects that are “low-hanging fruit,” such as installing efficient street lighting, replacing old boilers with more efficient ones, and piloting waste-to-energy programs.

Tamminen said that Gov. Schwarzenegger plans to “devote a lot of his time” to R20 when he leaves office in January. 

“Next year in South Africa when the world meets, and the UN is once again looking for a global deal, you can imagine him taking center stage and saying, “Well, we’ve got a deal for you!” said Tamminen.

Gretchen Weber will remain in Cancun for the next two weeks, following the UN climate talks as a fellow with the Earth Journalism Network, a project of Internews. You can check back here, at the Climate Watch blog for dispatches, and follow her on Twitter at: www.twitter.com/gxweber.