It’s hot in the castle-like Haus Carstanjen, unpleasantly hot. The heavy air feels as if the most ominous forecasts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have already come true: that the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere could rise by 6.7 degrees Celsius by 2100. But in fact the atmosphere at the United Nations Climate Secretariat in Bonn is oppressive simply because it’s a thundery summer day. Apart from which, the offices are further heated up by several hundred computers. And the 400 staff at the Climate Secretariat have to make do without the – energy-guzzling – comfort of air conditioning. But this is no noble gesture. “The building simply doesn’t have a/c,” says John Hay, the Secretariat’s spokesman, who has both a German and a British passport.
He and his colleagues simply create a draught by opening windows. It’s uncomfortable, but it does remind the perspiring staff why we need the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC: after all, the Earth, too, has no system for keeping its atmosphere’s temperature stable at the present average of 15 degrees Celsius. The situation’s better for the other 350 UN employees in Bonn, who are distributed among 18 secretariats and offices. They are now housed in the high-rise building known as “Langer Eugen” in Bonn’s former government quarter, which used to be occupied by Germany’s members of parliament. By 2011, the Climate Secretariat will also move into this building, which will then be called the UN Campus.
In this context the planners will have to bear in mind that this band of climate experts from over 60 countries is set to grow even larger. “We will probably have 500 staff by 2011,” says Hay. This is because climate change is becoming an increasingly important part of the political agenda, and the responsible UN secretariat has to process more and more data, formulate treaties and prepare conferences – there is one taking place somewhere in the world almost every day. There is a department, headed by Salwa Dallalah from Sudan, responsible specifically for these conferences.
Yet the beginnings were extremely modest. Hay sometimes takes visitors to the Marshall Room in the “castle”, the old part of Haus Carstanjen which was built in 1892. This is where the staff of the Federal Ministry for Matters of the Marshall Plan, the US-funded post-war reconstruction programme for Europe, held their meetings from 1949 to 1953. “When the Climate Secretariat moved from Geneva to Bonn in 1996, all 16 employees fitted in here without a problem,” Hay recalls, smiling. Not even a quarter of the personnel would find enough room there today.
If all the staff were to get together, the gathering would include many lawyers formulating treaties, as well as physicists and mathematicians sifting through the huge amounts of incoming data and judging whether the measures taken under the Kyoto Protocol really are helping the climate by reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. They would be joined by engineers who assist governments and companies with Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects, an important lever for implementing international climate-protection targets. Signatory states of the Kyoto Treaty can meet their climate-protection commitments in developing countries and simultaneously help them move to more sustainable development. The Climate Secretariat had registered nearly 1,800 CDM projects in 57 countries by the end of August 2009; 622 of these were in China, 450 in India. Three quarters of the projects are concerned with energy production. “The programme has now become very popular,” says a delighted David Abbass, who is responsible for CDM projects at the Climate Secretariat.
Part of his job is to explain how the package of measures works, namely by cutting emissions where it’s cheapest: “After all, the Earth doesn’t care where this happens,” the Canadian says. The important thing is that “the effects are measurable and additional”. For example, a waste-disposal facility built in Africa by a German company could not have been implemented in the foreseeable future, had it not been for a CDM project. Such issues are assessed by specially authorized offices of experts. Proving the additional climate effect is essential, because the project then earns the company in question an official certificate, a kind of right to pollute, which it can sell on at the current market price.
Not only companies can buy certificates on the emissions exchange, but also countries that have to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol. “Such countries can buy Certified Emission Reductions, or CERs, and meet part of their commitments to reduce emissions in this way,” says Abbass, explaining the key idea behind the system. However, they must also reduce their own climate-damaging emissions. Because the details of all this are complicated, the Climate Secretariat has the task of helping countries keep stock of their emissions.
Unfortunately, progress in climate negotiations is slow, as illustrated by the preparations for the major climate conference in Copenhagen in December 2009, where the aim is nothing less than new climate-protection targets to replace the Kyoto Treaty, which expires in 2012. There is an old poster hanging in the Marshall Room at Haus Carstanjen, produced to encourage the success of the European Reconstruction Plan all those years ago. Its design seems almost prophetic in relation to the Climate Secretariat. You see a windmill, the kind that are typical of farms in the United State. Each of the 16 rotor wings is decorated with the flag of a European country. The caption reads: “Whatever the weather – we must move together.” The climate activists, too, could use this poster to promote their cause. The only adjustment needed would be to give the windmill nearly 200 wings – one for each country on Earth.
