from Sunday Herald, 27 November 2011
So here we are again. Another big world summit on climate change, another set of desperate hopes and promises, and another feeling that we’re heading for a fall.
The 17th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP17) opens in Durban, South Africa, tomorrow (Monday). Ministers and officials from some 200 countries, including the redoubtable Stewart Stevenson from Scotland, will gather to try and hammer out progress on cutting the pollution that is wrecking the climate.
Prospects for the summit are about as bleak as they could be. No one expects any major breakthroughs, and no one believes that a legally-binding agreement – promised for Copenhagen two years ago and again for Cancun last year – will be reached.
In fact, the latest reports suggest that all the major industrialised nations have given up on making such an agreement until 2016, and even then it wouldn’t come into force until 2020. For the poorer countries struggling to survive the droughts, floods and storms already being triggered by climate change, that is much too late.
Perhaps that is why the former president of Costa Rica, José María Figueres, has called for an extension of the worldwide ‘occupy’ movement provoked by the banking crisis to Durban. “I have called on all vulnerable countries to occupy Durban,” he said.
“We need an expression of solidarity by the delegations of those countries that are most affected by climate change, who go from one meeting to the next without getting responses on the issues that need to be dealt with.”
The delay in reaching agreement has been condemned by the United Nations, and many of the developing countries vulnerable to climate change. It has been described as “reckless and irresponsible” by the Alliance of Small Island States, which represents those most at risk from rising sea levels.
The biggest problem is that President Obama’s US administration won’t contemplate binding limits on pollution because of fierce opposition from Congress. And critics are wary of challenging Obama too forcefully in case it helps a Republican become the next president.
If the US won’t back legal limits, neither will Russia, Japan, China or India, leaving only Europe in favour of them - and it is lukewarm and divided. So delegates are likely to leave Durban in two weeks without replacing the emissions reductions promised in the Kyoto Protocol, which is due to expire at the end of this year.
Progress on an agreement giving poor countries access to a promised $100 billion green fund to help them cope with the ravages of climate change also stalled last month. The US and Saudi Arabia withdrew support at the last minute, provoking ire from developing countries.
As an analysis for WWF, put it: “If the negotiations continue on the same path that they have been on this year, then COP 17 is doomed to fail.”
The deepening global financial crisis, coupled with looming threats of recession, hasn’t helped either. Political leaders have become more concerned with saving jobs than saving the planet, though environmentalists point out that the two are irrevocably intertwined.
“Expectations are pretty low going into the meeting,” said Dr Richard Dixon, director of WWF Scotland. “Given the accelerating greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere and the huge gap between where we are heading and where we need to be, the UN process needs a massive change if it is going to rise to the challenge of really reducing emissions.”
Last year the world’s emissions of carbon dioxide rose by almost six per cent, the biggest increase ever recorded, largely because more coal was burnt in China, India and other countries. According to a UN report last week, business as usual will leave the world a massive 12 gigatonnes of carbon short of needed reductions by 2020.
According to Oxfam, perhaps the best hope of progress in Durban is a move to agree multi-billion pound levies on the pollution caused by international shipping and aviation. France, Germany, South Africa and the World Bank have backed the idea.
“Such a deal would both help close the emissions gap and fill the green climate fund,” argued Oxfam’s Tim Gore in Durban. “It won't be easy, but there's never been a better chance for such a breakthrough.”
Scotland’s climate change minister, Stewart Stevenson, accepted that progress towards a global agreement had been slow. “But time is short,” he warned MSPs last week.
“No breakthrough is expected at Durban, and with global emissions at an all-time-high, we have only a short span of time to get emissions on a downward track.”
Others put it more dramatically. “The world is on a cliff edge,” said Stan Blackley, the chief executive of Friends of the Earth Scotland. “Society has the knowledge and the means to turn this situation around before it's too late.
“But without this action, we fear that we will be locked into an ever-worsening tailspin towards irreversible climate change and the significant negative impacts that this will cause.”
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