Exclusive interview

Achim Steiner has been the Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) since 2006. A German and Brazilian national, he formerly headed the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Ahead of this year's UN climate talks in Durban, South Africa, he spoke to Deutsche Welle about his expectations for the event.

Deutsche Welle: Until now the Kyoto Protocol has been the only legally binding agreement on emissions. Are we going to see its funeral in Durban?

Achim Steiner: At the moment I think there is a high risk that we may leave the Durban conference without a successor to the agreement in place. That seems to be almost an accepted reality. Perhaps even more troubling, also the disappearance of the Kyoto Protocol. From the perspective of those who have invested in making this protocol a foundation for climate action, like the European countries, that is obviously a big problem. Also from the perspective of developing countries.

What would be your best and worst-case scenarios?

Well, the worst scenario is that governments may not even be able to agree on what they wish to discuss and what they do not wish to discuss. We have seen it time and again in the meetings.

I hope what Durban will achieve is an atmosphere like in Cancun where basically everyone is committed to protecting the process, recognizing that there are major challenges in place, and also to accepting that major progress is unlikely at the moment.

If we can agree on an agenda and commit to working together, what we expect in Durban is the establishment of the green climate fund. A lot of work has been done over the last 12 months in preparing the ground for that and it would be a major signal, because without financing, without the vehicle for financing, the climate process will not be able to move forward.

What do you consider to be South Africa's strengths as host?

In South Africa we have a host nation that, over the past 20 years, has demonstrated an ability to negotiate some very difficult agreements, with very divergent interests.

Sufficient consensus is perhaps something I wish South Africa could reintroduce into climate change negotiations. Because countries would perhaps begin to focus again on all the things they actually agree on, rather than discussing the things they disagree on and never getting round to what is already accepted and shared in common objectives.

While climate negotiations inch forwards, science keeps warning us that we are rapidly losing the window of opportunity to keep global warming to a manageable level. Is the gap between politics and science growing instead of diminishing?

No, I actually believe that politicians today are more unified in their understanding of the climate challenge than at any point in time over the last 20 to 25 years.

Science, the work of the IPCC - notwithstanding some of the controversies around individual numbers and so on - has consolidated and established an understanding that global warming is not some hypothetical phenomenon; that its implications are beginning to become visible.

We should always remind ourselves that we were actually very close to a deal in Copenhagen. There were major shifts in positions - I still remember President Lula (Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, then President of Brazil) speaking to the assembly hall and saying 'We don't even want your money any more; we'll actually contribute money for developing countries to address climate change. We have to get out of this mode of what looks like a second-rate trade union bargaining session over wages.'

That is, I think, the problem. The dynamics of negotiations right now are simply not conducive to a deal. But it is not a problem of science and politicians not understanding the science.

The US has been blocking the process for years. Do you think it would be possible to have an international climate change agreement without America?

Clearly the political climate in Washington at the moment is deemed by many, including Americans themselves, as extremely difficult. So I think to count on America as a locomotive will be difficult.

Having said that, I think President Obama and Secretary Clinton and her team are still very much looking for things that can be done in the meantime. Here UNEP has highlighted over the last year and a half perhaps a very important way of buying back some time, which is the so called short-lift climate forces.

These are gasses and substances such as black carbon which are emitted through the burning of biomass, diesel trucks and engines, the emissions of methane and also tropospheric ozone. These are climate forces that taken together might account for more than a third of the global warming effect. If you can remove them from our atmosphere their impact is almost immediate, because their lasting timeline is literally a matter of weeks or months. So here are options which I think the USA is very interested in and that would allow us to make progress.

I think the world will at some point reach agreements – perhaps without some of the key players. You know people would say Kyoto could not succeed because the US was not part of it, and the US says China is not part of it, but Kyoto did a great deal of good even if in absolute emission reduction terms it was not intended to be the great quantum leap forward.

Interview: Helle Jeppesen / tkw
Editor: Nathan Witkop