Fast Start Finance website to provide information on industrialised nations' climate funding commitments The UN has today launched a new website designed to track climate funding commitments from industrialised countries in a bid to boost confidence that developed economies are delivering on their commitment to provide $30bn in " fast start" funding to help poorer nations combat climate change. The Netherlands-hosted website, titled FastStartFinance.org, was unveiled at a meeting of around 45 nations in Geneva where environment ministers are discussing climate funding proposals. The site will allow industrialised countries to provide data on their climate funding initiatives. So far six European donors, including the UK and Germany, have detailed their fast start funding commitments, providing information on 27 recipient nations. Dutch Environment Minister Tineke Huizinga urged other countries to provide information on how much money they will provide over the next three years to help developing countries cut carbon emissions and adapt to climate change. Christiana Figueres, head of the UN's climate change secretariat, welcomed the new initiative, arguing that it would help to boost confidence in the negotiations ahead of the crucial UN climate change summit in Mexico in November. "I have always called this short-term financing the golden key to Cancun," she told reporters. "It is particularly urgent and important to have clarity about the source, the allocation and the disbursement of the short-term funds." The $30bn fast start funding was one of the central commitments of the agreement hammered out at last year's Copenhagen Summit and its delivery is being seen by developing countries as a key test of industrialised nations' commitment to the deal.Diplomats hope that the provision of $30bn of "new and additional" funding will help to boost trust between the two parties and may serve to break many of the deadlocks that continue to mar the negotiations. However, concerns remains amongst poorer countries over the extent to which the funding committed to date has been diverted from other aid budgets. A recent analysis from Reuters suggested that industrialised countries had already pledged funding equal to the $30bn target, but it is unclear how much of the funding is new. Huizinga admitted the new website would not address such concerns as countries will be allowed to submit their own information, which will not be subject to checks. In an interview with Reuters, Figueres called on developing countries to show some flexibility when deciding where funding is genuinely new, noting that the Copenhagen Agreement was reached after many government's had completed their budgets for 2010 and as a result it was difficult for the them to deliver genuinely additional funding at short notice.
Patricia Espinosa says success of talks should not be measured by whether countries agree on a new legally binding text Mexico's foreign minister today dampened hopes of a breakthrough deal at the Cancun climate change talks in November, saying negotiators are focusing on making progress on smaller issues before perhaps seeking a comprehensive agreement in 2011 or later. Speaking after a two-day meeting in Geneva that dealt with how to pay for carbon-cutting projects in developing countries, Patricia Espinosa said the public should not measure the success of the Cancun talks by whether countries agree on a new legally binding text to combat global warming. "I don't think this is the right approach under the current circumstances," she told reporters. "Throughout the world there are really very different needs and interests." Organisers of the Cancun meeting, including the United Nations and the Mexican government, are trying to inject a sense of optimism and trust among negotiators after the last major round of talks in Copenhagen ended in failure last year. Swiss environment minister Moritz Leuenberger, who hosted the closed-door talks in Geneva, insisted countries are "no longer fixated" on agreeing on a successor to the 1997 Kyoto protocol, which scientists say does not go far enough in requiring countries to reduce their carbon emissions. Delegates traveling to Cancun, a Mexican resort city, should consider it a "unique opportunity to consolidate a cooperative framework that can allow us to move to immediate action," said Espinosa. Rich countries like the United States, which rejected the Kyoto protocol, want rapidly developing nations such as China and India to join in the effort to cut pollution. Poor countries say they will agree to a deal only if it includes significant financial aid to help them make their economies more green. Espinosa says such a "green fund" might be agreed in Cancun. But, according to Wendel Trio, climate policy coordinator at Greenpeace International, big differences remain over where the money should come from, who should get it, and how it would be controlled. "Given that climate finance is definitely one of the issues that will need to be solved, the fact that we haven't seen progress in the last two days is an indication that governments are not yet willing to move forward," said Trio. The sums involved are vast – $10bn annually for the next three years, $100bn a year starting in 2020 – and both sides are insisting on transparency to ensure commitments are kept and funds are not wasted. On Friday, the Dutch government launched a website aimed at tracking pledges made by rich countries and the programmes toward which they go. Meanwhile, US climate envoy Todd Stern told reporters that failure of a climate bill in the US Senate need not mean the end of attempts to introduce legal restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. "I am in no sense writing off legislation over time and I'm quite sure the president isn't either," he said. But he rejected any suggestion that the United States might sign up to the Kyoto protocol if no other agreement is agreed to replace it.
Computer scientist urges software developers to help climate scientists produce better modelling tools. From BusinessGreen, part of the Guardian Environment Network A study by a computer scientist at the University of Toronto suggests that the computer models used to predict climate change may be undermined due to a lack of programming expertise. Steve Easterbrook at the University's Department of Computer Science, has had his paper, Climate Change: A Grand Software Challenge, accepted by the 2010 FSE/SDP Workshop on the Future of Software Engineering Research. In the paper, he suggests that because many climate prediction software modelling tools are built by climate scientists rather than software engineers some of the resulting software has room for improvement. Climate scientists commonly use so-called Global Circulation Models (GCMs) that simulate the atmosphere, oceans, cryosphere and biosphere at a global scale, Easterbrook said. Underpinning them are data analysis tools designed to crunch the underlying numbers. "Most of this software is built by the climate scientists themselves, who have little or no training in software engineering," said Easterbrook in his paper. "As a result the quality of this software varies tremendously: The GCMs tend to be exceptionally well engineered, while some data processing tools are barely even tested." Easterbrook called for climate scientists to use applications written by experts in software design that would enable cross-disciplinary work to address climate change questions. These analysis tools would be proven capable of processing "earth models", he said. Secondly, Easterbrook argued that information sharing systems, such as games, reputation analysis software, and crowdsourcing tools could help to disseminate information on climate change efficiently and responsibly. Finally, he said that energy efficient green IT systems are needed to reduce power consumption in all areas where climate modelling software is used. "A massive mobilisation of talent will be needed. Other disciplines are already developing disciplinary responses to this challenge," Easterbrook concluded. "It is time for the software community to step up to the plate." • This article was amended on 2 September after Steve Easterbrook said the original headline - "Climate scientists should not write their own software, says researcher" - was inaccurate.
