Even as the science on climate change has become more certain, action has become more uncertain. At the ongoing COP19 summit in Warsaw, world leaders are back to bargaining how little they can contribute to save our home
I am at Warsaw as a Adopt a Negotiator Fellow and wearing the pristine ‘Negotiator Tracker’ T-shirt. I have a fancy role to ‘track’ my country’s negotiators to the 19th session of the Conference of the Parties, commonly known as COP19, and their role in the UN climate negotiations this year.
Those of you who are wondering what a COP is, let me tell you in the most sensible way I can: COP is the annual circus where leaders from all over the world meet to bargain how little they would like to contribute to save this planet; how the big brothers can get away scot-free polluting the environment and provoking the wrath of the nature.
It is one of the most civilised battlefields that there is. Here people try to rip each other over contentious issues like carbon taxes and carbon emission. The jargon that is thrown around here, if collected together, would be enough material to make another Concise Oxford Dictionary.
After the failure to agree on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol at COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009, the 195 parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change at COP18 in Doha last year extended the Kyoto Protocol while a new treaty is being negotiated. Cop 19 is supposed to be the beginning of those negotiations. A complete draft is due to be released at COP20 in Peru next year, and the final version is expected to be signed at COP21 in Paris in December 2015.
The UNFCCC plans to have the Paris Protocol (or Paris Agreement as India calls it, since it is not keen on using the word ‘protocol’ — I will provide more insights on this nuances in an upcoming post) ratified and in effect by 2020.
After the Climate Change conference at Doha in December last year, here we are are back again. COP18 had a nail-biting end that became a no-ball game. For the past 20 years, the world has been haggling about who will cut greenhouse gas emissions and how much.
In the same 20 years, the science of climate change has become more certain. The world is beginning to witness what the future will look like — more extreme events like the tropical storm Haiyan that claimed over 10,000 lives in the Philippines itself and the super cyclone Phailin in India are expected to cripple life and livelihoods across the world.
The Philippine’s lead negotiator at Warsaw, Mr Yeb Sano, said to a packed hall: “To anyone who continues to deny the reality that is climate change, I dare you to get off your ivory tower and away from the comfort of your armchair. I dare you to go to the islands of the Pacific, the islands of the Caribbean, and the islands of the Indian Ocean, and see the impacts of rising sea levels… And if that is not enough, you may want to pay a visit to the Philippines right now.”
But even as science has become more certain, action has become more uncertain. Take the Doha package, for instance: It was full of words, but no action. The second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol was agreed upon, but with weak targets and loopholes. The US did not agree to any meaningful emission reduction. The financial package is a broken promise.
Doha failed because the world agreed not to raise its level of ambition to meet the gigatonne and financial gap in climate negotiations. It had been agreed at the Bali conference back in 2007 that the industrialised world needed to cut 45 per cent below the 1990 levels by 2020 to enable a temperature increase of 1.5-2°C —considered to be safe levels. It was agreed that this would be done by Kyoto Protocol parties by increasing their levels of ambition and by non-Kyoto Protocol parties, mainly the US, by cutting emissions at ‘comparable’ levels.
Inclusivity is a key issue because of the rapid increase in greenhouse gas emissions from emerging economies like China and India. China is now the world’s largest emitter by a wide margin over the US, and India’s emissions have also increased fairly rapidly. Thus, most developed countries naturally think that China (and India and Brazil) should undertake emission reductions just as they have. India, in particular, strongly disagrees and argues that the West caused the problem and so must solve the problem.
The developing countries have also asked for clarity on how the rich world will provide the $100 billion annually it had promised to deliver, starting 2020. So far there has been little evidence that the developed countries are keen to do so.
India, along with Brazil, South Africa and China — the three other members of the ‘BASIC’ group — have also demanded that the talks bring out a clear timeline of how the funds would be ratcheted up to reach the target amount by 2020. But there is little hope.
(The writer is in Warsaw to attend the ongoing COP19 meet)