UN Warms Up Paris Agreement in Astana
Senior government officials from 85 countries signed a declaration intended to speed up sustainable energy use at a meeting in Astana, Kazakhstan June 11. It contains seven voluntary actions relating mainly to norms for achieving and measuring energy reduction and related data collection.
The declaration was adopted at the beginning of the Eighth International Forum on Energy for Sustainable Development, held under the auspices of Expo 2017 “Future Energy”, the UN, which co-organised it, said June 12.
Other items on the agenda were discussions on energy security, regional trade and infrastructure, the energy-climate-food nexus, renewable energy in central Asia, and new technologies.
The executive secretary of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, Shamshad Akhtar, said that the Paris Agreement on Climate Change would help address the aspects of quality of life and uneven distribution of energy while advancing sustainable energy use but she pointed out the need also to address fuel poverty.
Providing universal energy access by 2030 would cost €1 trillion, according to an estimate cited by Neven Mimica, European commissioner for international co-operation and development.
The decision of the US president last month to pull his country out of the Paris Agreement also sent shock-waves through rival political blocs such as China and the EU, although this had been one of Donald Trump's election promises.
According to UK paper The Guardian, Mimica told a conference in Brussels last week: “These are challenging times. The global commitment to the sustainable development goals – to climate action, to solidarity – this seems to be wavering globally. The significance of this new European consensus on development becomes much bigger than the sum of its parts because of this global questioning of climate action and even the sustainable development goals.”
Also in the Kazakh capital were two senior executives in the energy world: Russian energy minister Alexander Novak and vice president of the European Commission, Maros Sefcovic. They were expected to meet and discuss the Gazprom-led Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project, and the legal regime in which it would operate. The European Commission requested the mandate to negotiate terms on behalf of the European Union June 9.
Several EU countries, led by Poland, do not want the pipeline to be built as they believe it would wreck the economy of Ukraine which depends on gas transit revenues; and that it would strengthen Gazprom's position in central European gas markets.
So far the EC's lawyers have not found evidence that the offshore part of the pipeline is illegal, but once the gas flows into EU markets it will have to follow European laws, Sefcovic has said in the past.
William Powell