Cancún analysis: Dawn breaks on low-carbon world

Cancún's climate conference was largely a diplomatic triumph. No nations promised to up their emissions reduction targets from those pledged in Copenhagen. The compromise text that the delegates applauded was only work in progress, full of pledges to settle differences later – differences like the fate of the Kyoto Protocol, legally binding emissions targets and the role of carbon markets. The firmest commitment was to meet again next year in Durban, South Africa.

And yet behind the scenes, at side events across Cancún, the architecture of a remarkable new low-carbon world was on display - a world with ambition as great in developing nations as in the rich world.

Dozens of nations – rich and poor, forested and industrialised – came to Cancún having put flesh on promises made in Copenhagen, many of which were unilateral and do not depend on a UN agreement at all. If the talks ultimately founder in Durban or later, that momentum might just save the world without the leadership of the UN or the authority of a UN agreement.

Banking on change

Brazil, which promised to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 36 to 39 per cent from business-as-usual by 2020, declared that it was on the verge of eliminating one of its biggest sources of emissions: deforestation in the Amazon. Forest loss is down by three-quarters, from 27,000 square kilometres in 2004 to 6500 in the past year.

Satellite monitoring and better policing has helped. But so has a new national ambition. Last week the country's biggest bank, Banco de Brasil, said soya farmers wanting loans must prove their beans are not grown on newly deforested land.

Meanwhile, researchers from Brazil's state-backed agricultural research corporation, EMBRAPA, unveiled a plan for national low-carbon agriculture which could meet half of the government's Copenhagen promise. Gustavo Mozzer said no-till agriculture, which keeps more carbon in the soil, would become the norm for farmers. And ranchers would rehabilitate cattle pastures, turning them from the main driver of deforestation into carbon sinks. In total over 150,000 square kilometres of degraded pastures are earmarked to be rehabilitated in the next decade.

In other signs of independent action, the European Union has made law its promise to cut emissions by 20 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020. In the US, Barack Obama's Copenhagen promise of a 17 per cent cut below 2005 levels by 2020 was derailed by mid-term elections in October, but the country remains the world's biggest investor in the research and development of green energy. And Texas has some of the world's largest wind farms – not through any love of the UN or concern for climate, but because wind power is profitable.

Meanwhile California's cap-and-trade law, once seen as a blueprint for a federal scheme, comes into force regardless of any UN treaty in 2012. Already Californian corporations are planning ways to cut emissions at home and offset more abroad. In Cancún the Governors' Climate and Forest Taskforce, launched two years ago by Arnold Schwarzenegger and other state governors around the world, showcased offset projects in Acre in Brazil, Campeche in Mexico, Nigeria's Cross River state and Indonesia's Aceh.

The hope is to incorporate such schemes into the UN climate agreement's own programme for channelling western money into forest conservation, known as Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD).

The rules for REDD were broadly agreed in Cancún. But Daniel Nepstad, a leading forest ecologist now with the Amazon Environmental Research Institute, said REDD could go ahead even if the wider UN deal falters, funded by carbon traders in the EU, California and elsewhere.

Five-year plan

China's presence in Cancún was low key. But the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases is also taking steps to green its economy regardless of what happens in the halls of the UN. Its Copenhagen pledge to reduce the carbon intensity of its economy by 40 to 45 per cent by 2020 is now enshrined in its next five-year plan, which runs from 2011 to 2015. In the past three years, China has become the world's largest producer of both solar panels and wind turbines, and is planning its own internal carbon trading scheme.

Deforestation makes Indonesia the world's third largest emitter after China and the US. Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, who runs the presidential office charged with meeting its Copenhagen promise of a 26 per cent cut from business as usual, said "we aim to change our forests from net carbon emitters to net sinks".

This is no idle boast. Led by Brazil and Indonesia, global CO2 emissions from deforestation are down from 5 billion tonnes of CO2 in 2000 to 3.2 billion tonnes in 2009.

Does all this leave the UN process redundant? Few in Cancún last week would go that far. Most believe that legally binding national targets and global carbon trading would push the world to a low-carbon economy faster. But regardless of UN rules, many developing nations will want to emulate the "green growth" being planned by Brazil and China.

Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi told the conference he wanted Ethiopia to be carbon neutral by 2025, while still becoming a "middle-income nation." And Virigilio Vianni director general of the Amazon Sustainability Foundation and a leading figure in Brazilian forestry projects, told New Scientist that he was in talks with Indonesians, keen to export the Brazilian model to their own country.

On his way out of the summit, Nicholas Stern of the London School of Economics, author of the Stern Review of the economics of climate change told New Scientist that the key achievement of the talks was to give nations the feeling that they were working together towards a common goal, and therefore the confidence to pursue their own activities at home. The agreements printed on paper may only be modest, he said, but "there is now a very powerful momentum towards a low-carbon economy."