CLIMATE CHANGE: World leaders failed dismally to respond to the perils of climate change at Copenhagen, writes FRANK McDONALDEnvironment Editor
WHAT WILL it take to save the world from the perils of climate change? This fundamental question arises from the abject failure of 119 world leaders who gathered in Copenhagen 10 days ago – supposedly to make critical decisions on how to tackle the most serious environmental threat facing humanity and the planet.
So much hope had been invested in achieving a successful outcome of the 15th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that the Danish capital was even rebranded as “Hopenhagen” for the two weeks of COP 15. In the event, the hopes of millions of people regarding the conference were cynically dashed.
Under the deal hammered out by Barack Obama and the leaders of Brazil, China, India and South Africa, the aim would be to keep the rise in average global temperatures below two degrees Celsius, but no specific targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions were specified either in the medium or longer term. It’s all voluntary.
Copenhagen had the largest number of world leaders ever to attend a UN conference. The 119 heads of state and government represented 82 per cent of the world’s population, 89 per cent of its aggregate GDP and 86 per cent of global emissions – including the 20 largest economies and the top 15 emitters, according to the UNFCCC.
Their delegates had all agreed at COP 13 in Bali two years ago to enter into negotiating mode, with a view to concluding a globally comprehensive agreement on climate change by the end of 2009 – to ensure that there would be a treaty to replace or extend the Kyoto Protocol when its “first commitment period” runs out in 2012.
At the G8 leaders’ summit meeting in the earthquake-ravaged Italian town of L’Aquila last July, a lengthy communique (it ran to nearly 50 pages) from the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the US declared: “We must seize this decisive opportunity to achieve a truly ambitious global consensus.” Endorsing the scientific view that rising global temperatures “ought not to exceed two degrees”, the G8 leaders reiterated their willingness to “share with all countries the goal of achieving at least a 50 per cent reduction of global emissions by 2050, recognising that this implies that global emissions need to peak as soon as possible . . .” Although no targets for 2020 were set, they supported a goal for developed countries of reducing emissions by 80 per cent or more by 2050. “Similarly, major emerging economies need to undertake quantifiable actions to collectively reduce emissions significantly below ‘business-as-usual’ by a specified year,” the G8 said.
None of these pledges, with the single exception of the two-degree target, was included on the flimsy, three-page “Copenhagen Accord” cobbled together at the 11th hour as COP 15 drew to a close. When some developing countries objected strongly, they were warned that they could lose climate change aid unless they went along with it.
Yet the G8’s representatives, along with those of the wider G20 (including Australia, Brazil, China, India and Mexico) and 173 other countries had all been negotiating under the UN framework for the past two years, holding several sessions in Bonn and also in Accra, Bangkok and Barcelona. All of this was to culminate in Copenhagen.
What happened instead is that the slow-moving and often tortuous process was hijacked in the end by a powerful cabal with an agenda that was very short on specifics. And any hope that a more ambitious, legally binding agreement would be concluded at COP 16 in Mexico City next December was also scotched, thanks largely to the US.
Barack Obama was giving no hostages to fortune. Not only does he want to ensure that new climate and energy legislation gets through the US Senate, he must also bear in mind deep scepticism among Americans, only 25 per cent of whom now say they are “very concerned” about climate change, according to a recent poll.
Sarah Palin, moose-hunting siren of the US right, seized on the embarrassing e-mails hacked from the University of East Anglia’s climate research unit as a reason why Obama should not travel to Copenhagen at all. “Policy decisions require real science and real solutions, not junk science and doomsday scare tactics . . . ” she said.
Perhaps Palin believes that the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) constitutes “junk science”. Compiled by thousands of scientists from all over the world, it described global warming as “unequivocal” and said this was almost certainly due to human-induced greenhouse gas emissions.
The IPCC has said that global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions need to peak as early as 2015, and that developed countries should lead the way by cutting back their own emissions by 25 to 40 per cent by 2020. The EU’s unilateral offer of a 20 per cent reduction went some way towards meeting this, and put pressure on others to respond.
The Copenhagen Accord is likely to trigger a backslide on implementing measures to fulfil the pledges already made. After all, if there is no legal requirement to comply – as there is under the Kyoto Protocol – why would countries impose additional costs on their economies, putting them at a disadvantage in relation to competitors? The UN’s original climate change convention, adopted at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, committed its signatories to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere; the developed countries were to stabilise their emissions at 1990 levels by 2000. But this was entirely voluntary and, of course, it didn’t happen.
We already know (thanks to a leak to the Guardian) that an analysis of of all the pledges on the table in Copenhagen would equate to a rise in global average temperatures of at least three degrees. This doesn’t sound like much, but it would be disastrous – as One Degree Matters, a new documentary by the European Environment Agency, explains.
Given that the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report will not be finalised until 2014, the world will have to depend in the meantime on the continuing work of dedicated scientists investigating phenomena such as declining Arctic summer sea ice, melting glaciers, spreading drought in Africa, and the intensity and frequency of tropical storms.
With all the pressure on world leaders in Copenhagen, they still couldn’t agree on a meaningful deal that would avert dangerous climate change. Compared to the urgency of tackling the banking crisis or the $1.2 trillion (€823 billion) spent annually on “defence” by developed countries – over half by the US alone – it barely rates.
There are question marks over whether the UNFCCC process can make real progress. Nobody would doubt the personal commitment of UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon or the convention’s executive secretary, Yvo de Boer.
However, one can’t help recalling Mark Twain: “Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.”