UN Climate Summit yields precious little
WHAT is the fallout of the two weeks long UN Climate Talks held in the Danish capital of Copenhagen? What has been achieved so far is far short of a perfect deal as envisaged in the beginning.
Amid deep frustration expressed by most of the participants of the UN Climate Summit at the Bella Centre in Copenhagen, a political agreement was brokered between the US on the one side and the leading developing nations -- China, India, Brazil, South Africa -- on the other. President Obama took the lead by gate-crashing into a meeting among the four emerging powers (China, India, Brazil and South Africa) hosted by Chinese premier Wen Jiabao.
What came out is an apology for what was initially envisioned. There is no legally binding clause so that action could be taken against the defaulters, if any. What about containing the average global temperature so that it may not rise above 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit)? Well, the Copenhagen Accord reached among US and the four emerging powers only recognises the scientific need for such a temperature limit. There is nothing in it about who would bell the cat and how that would be done. Where are the emission reduction targets for individual nations, especially those that pollute the environment most -- the developed countries as well as the emerging powers?
The accord provides that the poor countries will get an adaptation fund of $30 billion between 2010 and 2020 and $100 billion a year after 2020.
This is all about the monetary carrot of adaptation aid to the poor nations that will be most affected by the climate change. But the money, even if it is made available as promised, will not go to halt the trend of global warning unless concrete actions to ensure drastic cuts in carbon emissions are adopted. There is no sign of any change of heart in this direction from the developed nations yet in sight.
African leaders could not hide their dismay as many ambitious emission-cut targets set in the previous rounds of discussions in the run-up to this summit have been conveniently forgotten in the Copenhagen accord. Most importantly, the views of the less privileged among the 193 countries attending the UN climate summit about the development in the talks and the accord pushed by the US, China, India, Brazil and South Africa reflect a feeling of betrayal.
Sudanese Ambassador Lumumba Di-Aping who chairs the bloc of developing countries, for example, termed it a gross violation of commitment against the poor, against the tradition of transparency and participation on equal footing for all parties of the convention, and against common sense.
To ward of disappointment and cynicism, US President Barack Obama, however, assured the gathering in Copenhagen that a less-than-perfect deal on the issue was better than no deal at all.
Such a pragmatic-sounding approach from the US president is not hard to understand. In fact, the stalemate, which the leader of the rich Northern economic powers has been keen to avoid, is the upshot of the industrialised powers' lack of strong commitment to emissions cut or reaching a legally binding agreement on it.
The US's position on the issue of global warming or climate deal, however, had always been far from enthusiastic. As for example, it rejects the Kyoto Protocol, which requires 37 industrialised nations to reach a modest level of emission cuts by the deadline of 2012. It was expected that the Climate Talks would produce another document to replace the Kyoto Protocol.
The bumpy road to a greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions cut deal, which is marked by deep distrust between the developed and developing nations, is not too unfamiliar a sight to the observers of such global talks. The reason is that the rich countries are not really willing to change their life-style and consumption habits. Moreover, they are least interested in compromising their business interests that have their roots in the burning of fossil fuels.
They started the burning since the Industrial Revolution took place three centuries back. Carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping GHG gases responsible for global warming have been gradually deposited in the atmosphere since then. The fast industrialising developing nations like China and India have joined these traditional carbon-emitting nations rather recently. Oddly enough, the developing nations are now being asked to take a greater share of the carbon burden. But they can do that only at the expense of their economic growth through industrialisation.
The developed countries are in favour of slapping a stricter emissions cut monitoring regime on the developing countries, on China in particular. China, on the other hand, is too sensitive to any condition imposed on it. It considers any outside agency peering into its industrial or any other activities as suspicious, and as interference in its internal affairs. Similar is the stand of many other developing nations like India, Brazil, South Africa, Venezuela and so on.
But that does not mean that these third world nations are not willing to make their activities relating to GHG emissions transparent. And if any monitoring is to be done then the Western industrialised nations, too, should be equally amenable to such monitoring. Unfortunately, the rich nations simply are not ready to accept any such conditions for themselves. They want only to dictate terms, which is yet another roadblock to smooth sailing of any talks between developed and the developing nations.
It was exactly such stubbornness and myopic view of things on their part that the World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks too foundered on the slippery ground of "subsidy on agriculture products," which the poor African nations considered a hindrance to the entry of their own agricultural products into the developed countries' markets.
At the UN Climate Talks, the US and all other highly industrialised nations have been actually after a trade-off with the developing and the most vulnerable nations without really committing themselves to any carbon emission cuts. So, unless there is a change of heart among the worst polluters nothing of substance can emerge in the future.
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