'De Boer's Resignation Is Catastrophic'
Yvo de Boer, the UN's climate chief, has announced his resignation. In the wake of an unsuccessful summit in Copenhagen he plans to leave diplomacy altogether and join a big-business consultancy as a climate expert. German papers aren't sure what's worse -- his departure from the UN, or the disappointments of Copenhagen.
The UN's top climate negotiator, Yvo de Boer, surprised a lot of people on Thursday by announcing his resignation. Shortly after hosting a climate conference in Copenhagen last December that fell short of a binding agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol, de Boer admitted he was "very depressed." But he insisted this week that the intractable problem of bringing the UN's 192 member governments to some kind of binding resolution was not the reason for his departure.
"It was a difficult decision to make," he said, "but I believe the time is ripe for me to take on a new challenge … I have always maintained that while governments privode the necessary policy framework, the real solutions must come from business."
After July 1 of this year he'll move to the private sector as a "Global Advisor on Climate and Sustainability" for the Dutch-headquartered audit and consulting firm, KPMG.
German papers on Friday are in sharp disagreement about whether de Boer's resignation is good or bad. None address the delicate question of whether he came under pressure to leave, but some lay the blame for Copenhagen's failure at the feet of Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The IPCC, which advises the UN, made a scientifically unsupportable claim in 2007 that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. This claim derived from research at Britain's University of East Anglia. It was e-mail conversations involving members of the university's Climate Research Unit that were leaked before Copenhagen, leading to the so-called Climategate scandal.
The left-leaning daily Die Tageszeitung writes:
"This resignation is catastrophic because of its timing: On the one hand the IPCC is under heavy fire from critics and needs defending. On the other, climate diplomacy after the shock of Copenhagen has started to revive again, with early discussions to probe how to put this process back on track."
"It's twice as perplexing that de Boer has set his resignation for July 1, and simultaneously announced a switch to the private sector. The next climate conference will begin at the end of May, in Bonn -- both he and his successor will have to lead it. His new job as a consultant can also be understood as a signal that world diplomacy is not the way to win the struggle against climate change."
