Financial Times: Accord in danger of disintegration
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/cc7ee872-f90b-11df-99ed-00144feab49a.html
Fiona Harvey.
World leaders will be thin on the ground at this year’s climate change conference in Cancun, Mexico.
After last year’s global summit in Copenhagen, attended by most of the world’s heads of state and government, this year’s meeting will be a rather drab affair.
Little is expected to be settled, with even the United Nations admitting that a global pact is out of reach this year, though it hopes that one may still be possible before 2012, when the current provisions of the Kyoto protocol expire.
Yvo de Boer, the chief UN official on climate change at Copenhagen and now adviser on the subject at KPMG, says that an agreement at Cancun would be “a bridge too far”.
For environment ministers, success will be measured in negative terms. If countries can avoid outright confrontation and acrimonious dissent, that will be something. If they can retain the agreements made at Copenhagen, even without moving beyond those commitments, that will be counted a victory.
The Copenhagen Accord, reached amid scenes of chaos as the UN process was hijacked by a handful of small countries, was derided by many non-governmental organisations as a failure, and recent research from the UN Environment Programme has established that the commitments on greenhouse gas emissions made in the Danish capital will be insufficient.
Nevertheless, the accord marked the first time that developed countries and important developing ones signed up to curbs on their greenhouse gas emissions. The US, which never ratified the 1997 Kyoto protocol, agreed to cut its emissions by 17 per cent by 2020, and China, India and Brazil, as well as other emerging economies, agreed for the first time in an international forum to reduce the rate of growth of their emissions.
Mr de Boer says the accord “captured a good deal of commitment on the part of the international community to rise to the climate challenge”. He believes Cancun could be an important staging point on the way to a new treaty. “In my view, we go to Cancun with a more robust international foundation than many think.
“Indeed, Copenhagen’s focus on setting targets and defining action plans suggests we can look optimistically to Cancun to deliver a business and financial focus. This is hugely significant, as private sector involvement can multiply the effect governments can realise on their own.”
But in the year since Copenhagen, the fragile accord has been in danger of disintegration. Rows between the US and China, in particular over how emissions should be monitored, have marred the intervening meetings.
Developing countries want rich nations to go further in cutting emissions and providing finance to help the poor world. Meanwhile, the European Union has been caught up in internal disagreements over whether to toughen its emissions-reduction target from 20 per cent by 2020 to 30 per cent cuts by the same date.
One of the most serious setbacks to proponents of the talks has been the failure of President Barack Obama to push forward his environmental agenda. When he took office, Mr Obama promised action on a cap-and-trade system for controlling carbon dioxide emissions in the US. That proposed legislation is now effectively dead, as the Republican party is hostile to action on emissions.
With the Republican victory in the mid-term elections, the White House is severely limited in what it can negotiate on the international stage. Although negotiators will continue to try to press for an agreement, the credibility of the US within the UN negotiations has been damaged.
Other countries remember the situation surrounding the Kyoto protocol, when the White House signed up to the pact but never joined it because it failed to bring the agreement before a Congress that was opposed to it.
Finally, the outlook remains clouded by the chaos that accompanied the end of the Copenhagen summit. In the final hours, although the main building blocks of a deal had been hammered out, a handful of countries – chiefly Venezuela, Bolivia and Sudan – held out on passing the decision.
This meant the accord never attained full legal status, and instead had to be adopted by a backdoor route. The way in which such a small number of leaders was able to hold the rest of the summit to ransom, as well as the acrimonious mood, and the trading of insults, threatened to discredit the whole UN negotiating process.
Some senior negotiators from the developed economies privately suggested that the UN might no longer be a suitable forum for such talks, and that a better alternative might be to try to forge agreement within the G8 or G20.
For many observers and participants who want to see a deal, therefore, the priority at Cancun is to stave off the potential collapse of the UN process.
“A complete collapse of the UNFCCC [framework convention on climate change] process would play to the climate sceptics, undermining confidence in climate science and climate action, and would unsettle the carbon markets,” warns Richard Gledhill, global leader on climate change at PwC, the consultancy.
“National policies are clearly the key to tackling climate change, but the international process provides the catalyst, and some of the funding, for ambition and action.”
Mr de Boer sees hope in the actions of businesses, which he says have become one of the main constituencies pushing for action because they want to see a level playing field and want to safeguard their future.
“Business is more engaged than ever on addressing the long-term issues of soaring energy prices, increasing energy security risks, an exploding global population and a scarcity of raw materials,” he says.
“In fact, forward-thinking enterprises recognise that responding robustly will create opportunities to generate a competitive edge.”
Some experts are pushing for an entirely different approach – one that would emphasise bilateral or multilateral deals among the main nations rather than requiring every one of the world’s governments to agree.
Michael Grubb, chairman of Climate Strategies, a research group based at the University of Cambridge, says: “It is vital that the international community continues to discuss collective action on climate change through the UN. However, if the US cannot move forward for now, the rest of the world should be looking at ways in which co-operation can be enhanced not weakened.
“In the short- to medium-term the emergence of low-carbon coalitions could play an important role in unblocking the negotiations, for example helping to overcome north-south divisions via collaborations on several dimensions of policy, including low carbon technologies and [carbon] pricing structures.”
These ideas are still controversial. Smaller developing countries are worried that they will be the losers from any deal struck among the big developed and emerging economies. They are reluctant to cede control from the only international forum that gives them a real voice.
Cancun will be the big test. If countries can succeed in maintaining a semblance of civility, and make progress on drawing up a text for a potential deal to be signed next year, then faith in the UN process may be restored.
If the meeting dissolves into acrimony, the clamour for an alternative process may become overwhelming.
