Will COP15 Fail?
Negotiating emissions caps and funding for green energy is proving tougher than expected, putting success in Copenhagen in doubt.
Words by Hamza Jilani.
WITH THE COP15 CLIMATE Change negotiations in Copenhagen less than a month away, many analysts are losing hope for a global deal to save the world from devastating and irreversible effects of global warming. Some fear the conference won't be able to come up with an effective successor to the expiring Kyoto protocol, and a few worry that conflicts between developed and developing countries are threatening to derail the negotiations altogether.
The major challenges they'll face, according to Michael A. Levi, a senior energy and environment researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations, are getting both developed and developing nations to agree on emissions caps, and figuring out how to split up the huge costs of transitioning the world to greener technologies.
“Many US lawmakers want absolute near-term emissions caps from China and India, but those countries will not sign up for anything of the sort for at least another decade. And before they consider a deal of any kind, Chinese and Indian negotiators are demanding that developed countries commit to cutting their greenhouse gas emissions by over 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020, but none of the world’s wealthiest countries will even come close to meeting this goal,” Levy writes in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs. (Free with sign-up.)
“Meanwhile, China, together with other developing countries, is also asking the wealthy nations to commit as much as one percent of their collective GDP—more than $300 billion annually—to a fund that would help the rest of the world reduce its emissions and adapt to climate change. But Western politicians will not be willing to send anything near this amount of money to their economic competitors in order to secure a deal.”
Preliminary meetings have not been promising; and have produced little progress towards an agreement. Most recently, finance ministers from the G20 leading and emerging economies ended a two-day meeting in St. Andrews, Scotland, on November 9, without having made any progress on how to split the global bill for tackling climate change. According to Reuters, the G20’s hour-long debate was so heated that there was a risk the final statement wouldn't mention climate change at all.
“Basically a group of emerging nations made it clear that they were unwilling to invest their own funds in the fight against climate change,” German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told the Associated Press.
COP15, the fifteenth annual Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, is geared to achieve a post-Kyoto Protocol global climate agreement and will take effect in 2012, when the Protocol expires. Delegates from an estimated 192 countries, along with representatives from many corporations will take part in the Conference.
Large developing nations like India and China did not face binding emissions targets under the Kyoto protocol. But emissions from those nations have radically increased since Kyoto was negotiation. According to Globalcarbonproject.org, India's emissions grew by 103 percent between 1992 and 2007, and China's by 150 percent. The governments of these countries feel that committing to emissions targets would sacrifice the economic growth their populations need.
India is in the lead of an Asian coalition which is pressing the UN to force developed countries to make bigger emission cuts, and to provide funding and technology to developing nations to help them to make the transition to green, renewable energy to power their growing economies.
Nor is the resistance to Western foot-dragging only from Asia. According to AllAfrica.com, the Pan African Parliament Network for Climate Change is calling for industrialized countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40 percent by 2020 below 1990 levels and between 80 and 95 percent by 2050—much higher than the targets those countries are currently considering. They are also asking developed countries to put aside 1.5 percent of their GDP to support climate change mitigation and adaptation in Africa.
Arguments aside, COP15 needs to result in real targets to which world nations can agree to bind themselves. If a viable global agreement is not achieved, and emissions continue, the result could be catastrophic and irreversible.
“If the whole world comes to Copenhagen and leaves without making the needed political agreement, then I think it’s a failure that is not just about climate,” COP15 President Connie Hedegaard told cop15.dk.
“It’s the whole global democratic system not being able to deliver results in one of the defining challenges of our century. And that is and should not be a possibility. It’s not an option.”
What will success—or failure—in Copenhagen look like? Look out for a feature on what to expect from the Copenhagen conference in the December issue of JO.
