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Ilulissat climate talks

Ilulissat (Jakobshavn in Danish) is the third largest settlement in Greenland, on the west coast. This week (August 16-19) it is playing host to environment ministers from 25 industrialized and developing countries: Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, Sweden, the United States and a number of other European countries. Their discussions, aimed at stimulating international cooperation on climate change, will be particularly interesting in the light of the recent Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development & Climate, which is separate from the Kyoto Protocol. The decision of the United States to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001 made it a lot less clear how the world would be able to deal effectively with global warming.

There will be separate meetings in November for parties involved in each treaty to decide where to go next - in Canada for Kyoto and in Australia for the Asia Pacific. There is also to be a follow up to the Gleneagles G8 meeting in London in November. The Canada meeting will concentrate on what happens after 2012, which is as far as the Kyoto Protocol goes up to.

Greenland is a country which is experiencing first hand the effects of global warming, from melting glaciers to dry summers, thawing permafrost to heavy summer rain. The ice is getting thinner and arrives later and disappears earlier. This makes it difficult to carry on traditional ways of life. For example, hunters cannot use dogsleds on pack ice because it is broken up for much more of the year, and seals and polar bears are much scarcer. Some have turned to tourism to make up for the loss of their livelihood.

Greenland is also at a very important point of the ocean conveyor belt. Ilulissat is on Isfjord, a UNESCO World Heritage site in the Disko bay. It is 250km north of the polar circle. It is a place where the ministers can see the effects of global warming first hand. They will be able to see the Greenland icecap and sea ice - what there is left of it. Perhaps they will visit Kangerdlussuhaq, one of Greenland's biggest glaciers, which is now the fastest moving glacier in the world. It is moving at 14km a year, compared to 5km p.a. in 1988. Or perhaps they might visit the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier, which had receded by more than five kilometers (three miles) in the past two years last year.

Unusually, there will be no formal agreements from the conference, ministers can take only one official with them, and there will be little media access - the discussions will be confidential. It is hoped that this will give ministers a better chance to really discuss the issues and understand better where they are each coming from. There will be a news conference at the end of the conference, however.

The recently-published Arctic Climate Impact Assessment shows that the Arctic has been heating up twice as fast as the rest of the Earth for the past decade, and this could result in the Arctic ice melting completely during the summer within less than a century.

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