‘Butler’ De Boer Resigned to Danish Climate Summit Shortcomings

Bloomberg, By Alex Morales

Dec. 6 (Bloomberg) -- On the eve of the climate summit in Copenhagen, Yvo de Boer, the man shepherding United Nations efforts to forge a global warming deal, is resigned to the talks producing no treaty this year.

The head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change has toured the world since 2007 to get envoys from China to the United States to sign off on an accord that binds richer nations to emissions cuts and channels climate aid to the poor.

“It’s clear he hasn’t got all the big players on board but I don’t think he could have,” Kim Carstensen, leader of the global climate initiative at the environmental group WWF, said in an interview. “Countries haven’t delivered what they’re supposed to in terms of clarity, commitments and proposals.”

At the Copenhagen summit that starts tomorrow and runs to Dec. 18, the son of a Dutch diplomat will renew his call for 192 nations to bridge gaps between their goals by reining in carbon- dioxide discharges from power plants and factories that scientists say is fueling global warming and melting ice caps, threatening island-states and low-lying coastal cities.

De Boer’s immediate task is reduced to getting a political framework agreed upon among competing economies like the U.S., Japan and the European Union that’s acceptable to growing powers such as China and India and nations most threatened by global warming in Africa and the Pacific Ocean.

That political deal can turn into a legally binding accord “within a year after Copenhagen,” de Boer said on Nov. 5 at the last climate meeting in Barcelona before Copenhagen.

The 55-year-old goes about the job without pointing fingers at who’s to blame and understates his role as a stage manager.

‘The Butler’

“I’m sort of the butler, trying to facilitate the process off-camera,” he said in an interview in Barcelona. He said he spends much of his time offering suggestions and “pointing out that serious concerns of countries need to be dealt with.”

When he said a treaty wasn’t possible this year, Caribbean envoys who declined to be named said it wasn’t helpful for the UN climate chief to make such comments. They want to see a legal document binding richer nations to emissions cuts of 45 percent.

At the 2007 talks in Bali, Indonesia, the U.S. delegation was booed and Papuan negotiator Kevin Conrad was cheered when he urged the U.S. to “get out of the way.” In Barcelona, African nations staged a daylong walkout of the talks. De Boer says similar protests may occur in Copenhagen.

“It’s a multilingual, multinational, multicultural exercise,” said Michael Zammit Cutajar, UN climate chief from 1991 to 2002. “You have to be very patient. You have to listen to a whole range of views, you have to be able to understand people who have different ways of thinking.”

Colleagues and analysts say the diplomat has approached the role with passion and commitment since becoming head of the UN climate secretariat in Bonn in 2006 after the death of the incumbent, Joke Waller-Hunter.

Yvo’s Tears

De Boer even has been driven to tears by envoys. He cried two years ago in Bali after Chinese delegates questioned the agency’s impartiality, demanding to know why meetings twice started before their officials were ready.

“It tells you that he’s a man who’s passionately committed to the job,” Zammit Cutajar said. He said he uses as a screensaver a photo of him talking with de Boer after the incident, both clad in colorful Indonesian print shirts.

The Bali meeting ended the same day with nations overcoming differences to agree to two years of talks to devise an accord in Copenhagen to rein in climate change.

De Boer estimates travel takes up to 80 percent of his time. The role this year has taken him to the U.S., China, Thailand, India, Kenya and Spain. During formal negotiations, he shuttles between meetings with country delegates, the press and non-governmental organizations.

Blame the Countries

Failure to write a treaty in Copenhagen should be blamed on countries, said Carstensen and Alden Meyer, director of policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington.

“If the parties aren’t willing to negotiate with each other, the secretariat can’t impose a deal,” Meyer said.

De Boer was a Dutch and European Union negotiator in the 1990s and 2000s, helping prepare the EU position before the 1997 summit in Japan that produced the current climate treaty, the Kyoto Protocol.

Born in Vienna in 1954, he attended a U.K. boarding school before obtaining a degree in social work in the Netherlands.

After years on the road on climate negotiations, de Boer says he now craves the quiet life with his wife and three children.

“It’s what I’m looking forward to when all of this is over,” he said. “A Copenhagen deal will be a very important moment. I don’t know yet exactly what it’s going to deliver -- it’s certainly not going solve the whole problem of climate change in one go so the process will continue.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Alex Morales in London at amorales2@bloomberg.net.

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Yvo de Boer, left, and Rachmat Witoelar, leaders of the climate change conference
in Bali, Indonesia, shook hands Saturday (Murdani Usman/Reuters)