The planet’s climate future and Doha summit

The annual United Nations climate summit is going on in Doha, the capital of the oil-rich emirate of Qatar, on the Arabian Peninsula during Nov. 26-Dec.7, 2012. Dubbed “COP 18,” an army of bureaucrats, business people and environmentalists are gathered ostensibly to limit global greenhouse-gas emissions to a level that scientists say will contain the global temperature rise to 2°C, and perhaps stave off global climate catastrophe. If past meetings are any indication, national self-interest on the part of the world’s largest polluters, paramount among them the United States, will trump global consensus. As an usual Brazil, China, India and South Africa, the Basic bloc which are the top emitters say developed nations must produce more ambitious emissions targets for Doha summit. The summit will not come up with an answer to the global temperature rise that is already melting Arctic sea ice and permafrost, raising and acidifying the seas, and shifting rainfall patterns, which has an impact on floods and droughts. They will focus on side issues, like extending the Kyoto protocol — an expiring emissions pact with a dwindling number of members — and ramping up climate financing for poor nations. The Basic bloc released a joint ministerial statement late on Tuesday saying responsibility for the outcome of the latest round of UN climate talks in Doha lay in the hands of rich countries. “Ministers reaffirmed that the Kyoto protocol remains a key component of the international climate regime and that its second commitment period is the key deliverable for Doha, and the essential basis for ambition within the regime,” they said. The Kyoto protocol, the only international treaty to set legally binding targets on cutting greenhouse emissions, expires at the end of the year. Around 30 European nations and Australia have signaled they are ready to take on new targets. But major emitters such as Canada, Japan, Russia and the United States will not take part, saying the UN pact will have no environmental impact until it imposes similar targets on large developing nations, including China and India.

China and India are the world’s biggest and third biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, respectively. A report released this week by the World Resources Institute, a US thinktank, showed two-thirds of the world’s planned coal-fired power plants will be built in China and India, ensuring their carbon output will continue to soar. Developed countries are keen to begin negotiations on a new treaty to cap emissions from all countries. At last year’s UN climate talks in Durban, negotiators agreed that such a deal must be reached by 2015 at the latest, and go into force in 2020. But the Basic countries said even a new treaty should be negotiated along the same principles as the current UN climate convention, keeping a division between rich and poor nations. The Kyoto protocol states that countries are bound by the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities”, which puts most of the burden for combating climate change in the hands of rich nations with larger historical rates of emissions. “The Durban platform is by no means a process to negotiate a new regime, nor to renegotiate, rewrite or reinterpret the convention and its principles and provisions,” they said, signaling they will not accept the same treatment as rich countries in any new treaty. The statement shows the developing nations are concerned about the pace of the negotiations, said Li Yan, a climate campaigner with Greenpeace China. “Big developing countries, especially China, will need some time to do its homework and think of what it can do,” she said

The “pledge and review” system for emissions reductions that was introduced at the 2009 U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen should be reconsidered because it “will not bring about the fundamental changes needed in order to fight climate change in the long run,” the resolution said. The main outcome of the Copenhagen summit was the Copenhagen Accord, to which countries’ emissions reduction pledges are appended, and which stated that implementation of the pledges would be assessed by 2015. The world tried to move forward without the U.S. after the Bush Administration abandoned the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 pact limiting greenhouse emissions from industrialized nations. As that agreement expires this year, the climate curves are still pointing in the wrong direction. The concentration of heat-trapping gases like CO2 has jumped 20 percent since 2000, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil, according to a U.N. report released this week. And each year, the gap between what researchers say must be done to reverse this trend, and what’s actually being done, gets wider.

“We want our children to live in an America ... that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet,” President Barack Obama proclaimed in his victory speech on Nov. 6 this year, just over a week after Superstorm Sandy devastated New York City and much of New Jersey, killing more than 100 people. These are fine aspirations. The problem is, action is needed now to avert the very scenario that President Obama has said he wants to avoid. The United States, which remains the greatest polluter in world history, stands as one of the biggest impediments to a rational global program to stem global warming.

Latest findings suggest that the goal of limiting global temperature rise to 2°C may now be beyond reach, and that we may now be locked into a 4°C to 6°C temperature increase. The only way to avoid the pessimistic scenarios will be radical transformations in the way the global economy currently functions: rapid uptake of renewable energy, sharp falls in fossil fuel use or massive deployment of CCS i.e. carbon capture and storage, removal of industrial emissions and halting deforestation. Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, Nigerian activist Nnimmo Bassey and Ambassador Pablo Solon, who formerly led climate negotiations for Bolivia, said in their letter to the COP 18 negotiators: “If we want a 50-50 chance of staying below two degrees, we have to leave 2/3 of the known reserves of coal and oil and gas underground. ... That’s not ‘environmentalist math’ or some radical interpretation—that’s from the report of the International Energy Agency last month. It means that—without dramatic global action to change our path—the end of the climate story is already written. There is no room for doubt—absent remarkable action, these fossil fuels will burn, and the temperature will climb, creating a chain reaction of climate related natural disasters.”

The World Meteorological Organization released preliminary findings for 2012, highlighting extremes of drought, heat waves, floods, and snow and extreme cold, as well as above-average hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin for the third consecutive year. Also speaking at the COP 18’s opening was from the Indian, Dr. R.K. Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, comprising more than 1,800 scientists from around the globe, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. In sober, scientific language, Dr. Pachauri, pointed out potential catastrophes unless action is taken, among them: “By 2020, between 75 and 250 million people in Africa and third world countries are projected to be exposed to increased water stress due to climate change. ... As global average temperature increase exceeds 3.5°C, model projections suggest significant extinctions ranging from 40 to 70 percent of species assessed around the globe.” Outside the air-conditioned plenary halls and corridors of the UN climate summit in Doha, in the emirate of Qatar—which, ironically, is the nation with the highest per capita carbon emissions of any nation on the planet—there will be protests. The newly formed Arab Youth Climate Movement, hundreds of grassroots activists from across the region, including many involved in the Arab Spring, are marching, calling for their nations to take the lead in reducing corporations.

Bridging that gap, through clean technology and renewable energy, is not just up to the U.S., but to countries like India and China, whose carbon emissions are growing the fastest as their economies expand. “The perception of many negotiators and countries is that the U.S. is not really interested in increasing action on climate change in general,” said Bill Hare, senior scientist at Climate Analytics, a non-profit organization based in Berlin. Todd Stern, the U.S. special envoy on climate change, caused alarm among climate activists in August when he said that “insisting on a structure that would guarantee such a goal will only lead to deadlock.” He later clarified that the U.S. still supports the 2-degree target, but favors a more flexible way to reach it than dividing up carbon rights to the atmosphere. Countries adopted the 2-degree target in 2009, reasoning that a warming world is a dangerous world, with flooding of coastal cities and island nations, disruptions to agriculture and drinking water, and the spread of diseases and the extinction of species. A recent World Bank report found the world is on track toward 4°C of warming, which would entail “extreme heat-waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise.” The U.S., alone among industrialized countries, didn’t ratify the Kyoto Protocol because it found it unfair that China and other emerging economies, as developing countries, were not covered by any binding emissions targets. The U.S. and other rich countries say that firewall must be removed as the talks enter a new phase aimed at adopting a new climate treaty by 2015 that applies to all countries.

Therefore. the issue is unlikely to be resolved in Doha, where talks will focus on extending Kyoto as a stopgap measure while negotiators work on the wider deal, which would take effect in 2020. The 27-nation EU, Switzerland, Norway and Australia are on board but New Zealand, Canada and Japan don’t want to be part of a Kyoto-2. That means the extended treaty would cover only about 15 percent of global emissions. Delegates in Doha will also try to finalize the rules of the Green Climate Fund, which is supposed to raise $100 billion a year by 2020. Financed by richer nations, the fund would support poorer nations in converting to cleaner energy sources and in adapting to a shifting climate that may damage people’s health, agriculture and economies in general. In addition, countries need to agree on a work plan to guide the negotiations on a new treaty. Without a timeframe with clear mileposts, there’s a risk of a repeat in 2015 of the hyped-up but ultimately disappointing climate summit in Copenhagen. Judging by previous conferences, the negotiations in Doha will ebb and flow, with progress one day being replaced by bitter discord the next. And in the end, after an all-night session, bleary-eyed delegates will emerge with some kind of face-saving “accord” or “action plan” that keeps the talks alive another year, but does little to address the core problem. Only discussing and discussing without an action.

9-Dec-2012 / 01:44 AM / N Munal Meitei / 0 Comments