The Philippines will be joining some 200 environment and climate change ministers worldwide in the first of a series of talks in Bonn, Germany from April 9 to 11, which will wind up to the United Nations-led 16th Conference of Parties (CoP-16) in Mexico in December, hopefully to forge a new binding global treaty on climate change.

Led by Presidential Adviser on Global Warming and Climate Change Secretary Heherson Alvarez, also Vice Chairman of the Climate Change Commission, a lean delegation from the Philippines went to Germany for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meeting to seek binding commitments from other countries to address the ill-effects of climate change.

The Philippines is one of the 192 member-countries of the UNFCCC.

“This will be the first conference after the Copenhagen Accord in December last year at the 15th Conference of Parties. We will again negotiate on behalf of the Philippines for further commitments of Annex- I developing countries,” Alvarez said.

He expressed optimism that the new round of talks this year will finally craft a legally binding agreement by CoP-16 in Mexico this December as a follow-through of the commitments made in CoP-15.

The Copenhagen Accord, which was assumed by huge carbon-emitting countries led by the United States during the CoP-15 in Copenhagen, Denmark in December last year, received criticisms from poor and developing countries saying that it is insufficient for a “fair, ambitious and binding” agreement to address climate change.

The Accord is intended as a substitute for the legally-binding Kyoto Protocol, due to expire in 2010, which was crafted to request developed countries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions and finance the poor and developing countries capacity to cope up with the effects of climate change.

“We expect the UNFCCC to again ask for the position of the Philippine government regarding the controversial Copenhagen Accord, together with a submission of our nationally-appropriate mitigation actions or NAMAs,” he said.

Last February, the Climate Change Commission sent a communiqué to the secretariat of the UNFCCC informing the international body that “the Philippines is still in the process of internal consultations with respect to the possibility of its association with the Copenhagen Accord.”

As of April 7, a total of 116 countries have either endorsed, supported or associated themselves with the Copenhagen Accord, which calls on developed countries to provide US$30 billion in new, additional funding for developing countries from 2010-2012, and $100 billion a year by 2020.

The Accord is devoid of specifics as to its source, provision and governance.

Delegation members to the UNFCCC meeting from government include CCC Commissioner Naderev Sano, Agriculture Undersecretary Segfredo Serrano, Foreign Affairs Director Leila Santos, and Loraine Gatlabayan and Catherine Adraneda of the Climate Change Office.

A team of experts from the private sector is also part of the delegation, namely Jasper Inventor of Greenpeace International, Romeo Trono of Conservation International, Vicente Yu of South Centre, Elenita Dano of the Action Group on Erosion Technology and Concentration, and Victoria Corpuz of Tebtebba Foundation.