Copenhagen 2009: Draft Text and Summary of the Climate Change Accord

Click here to read the draft text and appendices of the "Copenhagen Accord" president Obama announced at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

Here's the summary:

• Climate change is the greatest challenge of our lifetimes.
  
  
• Countries will enhance their cooperation to combat climate change and keep global temperatures from rising more than 2° C.
  
  
• Developed countries will provide "adequate, predictable and sustainable financial resources, technology and capacity-building to support the implementation of adaptation action in developing countries."
  
  
• The so-called Annex I countries committed to individual emissions targets that they would meet by 2020.
  
  
• Non-Annex I countries pledged to implement their own mitigation actions. They will communicate these actions every 2 years.
  
  
• Programs such as REDD-plus will provide financial incentives from developed nations to prevent deforestation and forest degradation.
  
  
• Developed countries will pay $30 billion between 2010 and 2012, with a goal of reaching $100 billion by 2020, to fund mitigation and adaptation efforts in developing nations. This amount includes REDD incentives.
  
  
• A High Level Panel will study how the money is being sourced.
  
  
• A Copenhagen Green Climate Fund will take care of transferring funds between parties, and a Technology Mechanism will "accelerate technology development and transfer."
  
  
• Finally, the accord asks that its implementation be assessed by 2015. Nothing legally binds anyone to do anything.

Is this the start of something big? Or simply a lot of hot air? Time will tell.

Oh, by the way: the a in Copenhagen is not pronounced aa but ay.

Tracking Deforestation With Help From Google's Cloud

Countries will now have an easier time tracking the destruction of their forests, thanks to satellite images and cloud computing.

At the International Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen Thursday, Google introduced technology that enables online observation of deforestation over time.

The technology helps nations benefit from the United Nations' REDD framework (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries), which pays countries with rainforests to protect their forests from denudation. To be eligible, the deforestation must be independently verified and tracked over time. Many of the tropical countries where deforestation occurs lack the funds to adequately monitor the forests' destruction.

Google Earth will provide the satellite images recording the advance of deforestation. The data will be combined with existing software from the Carnegie Institution for Science and Imazon, which maps forest cover and deforestation using satellite imagery.

All these petabytes of historical satellite image data will be crunched in thousands of computers in Google's data centers worldwide.

Google will provide the world this technology as a not-for-profit service. It is available at present to a few organizations for testing, and may be offered "more broadly" in 2010.

The advantages of using the cloud to compute deforestation data: lightning speed, lower costs, privacy, security and transparency. Add in the environmental benefits from halting or slowing deforestation and REDD financial incentives to rainforest countries, and everyone's a winner.

(Source of story: Mediapost.)