The Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol met in Bali in December 2007. 1 After some high-stakes poker about emission reduction frameworks and the role of emerging economies, participants settled on a road map for negotiating a new climate agreement by the end of 2009. The Bali meeting also managed to achieve progress on a number of important issues relating to the Adaptation Fund, avoidance of deforestation through REDD, technology transfer, and CDM.

Suddenly, climate change is hogging the news. Dire disasters are being foretold. There are lurid accounts of widespread devastation and displacement of millions of people, especially in low elevation coastal areas, resulting from global warming and the rise in sea levels.

Global carbon trading has gained momentum. The Worldwatch Institute, drawing from various studies, places the total value of the trade in 2007 at $59.2 billion, an 80 per cent increase over 2006. As the 2012 deadline for reducing emission levels approaches, the volume of carbon trading will be enormous. Asian countries are the biggest sellers and western countries the biggest buyers. A World Bank report on the 2007 carbon market shows that China has a market share of 61 pe r cent and India 12 per cent.

The aim of the recent UN climate change conference in Nusa Dua (Bali, Indonesia) was widely held to be two-fold. To finalise the operational details of the Kyoto Protocol Adaptation Fund (AF), and to put together a

This report presents a summary of what has been learnt through the third round of consultations, interviews and questionnaire surveys with policymakers and climate policy researchers across the Asia-Pacific region. It considers how sectoral approaches can be integrated in the future climate regime by looking at institutional and operational issues from an Asian perspective. It examines incentive structures and the political feasibility of selected proposals on technology cooperation.

Promoting forest restoration and sustainable forest management has more promise for mitigating climate change than narrowly focusing on reducing greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD).

This report assesses the contribution of the CDM to meeting its environmental and sustainable development objectives and provides recommendations for improving the

"Contraction and Convergence' (C&C) is the science-based, global climate-policy framework, proposed to the United Nations since 1990 by the Global Commons Institute (GCI).

Future international scientific climate change assessments should be faster, more integrated, and more directly linked to policy questions.

us President George W Bush has announced a climate meeting for the end of September. The announcement comes at a time when there is already a un-led initiative to hammer out an agreement on

Pages