It’s just gone midnight, we’re already a day and a half overtime, and there’s yet another new decision text freshly out. It is, the COP President Manuel Pulgar-Vidal tells us, a compromise where “everyone wins” and one that includes everyone’s ideas.
And yet somehow it has become “more focused” - much more focused so that it is now two pages shorter, down to only five pages.
So far, the reception from both negotiators and civil society is lukewarm at best. But there’s a good chance that this text, or a very slightly tweaked version of it, will pass in the small hours of this morning (or perhaps not so small - we might well break Durban’s record for the longest two week climate conference ever).
What it does unambiguously is leave most of the hardest decisions for Paris. We simply have not discussed, let alone decided on the legal form of the 2015 agreement. Key ideas are still relegated to pre-ambulatory clauses with no real legal force. Key questions about loss and damage, finance, and - yes - even the content and nature of mitigation commitments have been thrown in the hold basket for next year.
We don’t even have a draft Paris Agreement in the text anymore. We were hoping for a draft text now, and its been gently kicked to May 2015 - after parties are due to submit their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs). And a footnote lets parties introduce any new idea to that draft text any time next year. Practically, this means that the INDCs are likely to be a race to the bottom, because parties won’t know what legal force they’ll have, if any, when they submit it.
This is messy. There’s a lot to do next year.
For Paris to be anything but an utter cop out, leaving us trapped in an endless conference to agree on eternal negotiations recurring annually without end for ever, things will need to be different. Here are two big compromises that might change the dynamic and help get a meaningful deal across the line.
1) Find the finance
“Where’s the finance?” has been a rallying cry for civil society for too long. It’s past time for the wealthy countries to find the finance. Without meaningful climate finance, the old divides will continue to deepen. There’s a trust gap here, and an ethical gap.
In Cancun in 2010, the richest countries together promised to mobilise US$100 billion per year in climate finance each year from 2020. Now, almost half way to 2020, we’ve just put the first $10bn into the Green Climate Fund, and we still have no roadmap to get to the $100 billion goal.That is:
There has also been little progress in defining a roadmap for how to boost funding for adaptation and low-carbon development in vulnerable nations to $100 billion a year by 2020, as governments promised to do five years ago.
“For the poorest, this means they are being told to ‘fend for yourselves; we don’t care about you’,” said Saleemul Huq, director of the Dhaka-based International Centre for Climate Change and Development.
New Zealand in particular needs to stump up with a new, meaningful Green Climate Fund contribution of more than NZ$1 per capita. And this finance needs to be new and additional.
I spoke today to some negotiators from the Least Developed Countries group, comprising 48 of the most climate vulnerable countries with the least historical responsibility. They bluntly told me that they had not seen much additional climate finance - just redirected aid. At most, they estimated that 25% of the claimed climate finance was new and additional. Bilateral aid drops and the money comes under a new name, nothing more.
Last year, New Zealand proposed the relatively inoffensive Warsaw Partnership on Effective Climate Finance. Despite largely regurgitating basic principles of modern development studies, it remains stillborn. Developing states negotiators saw it as - to borrow a term - a dead rat that New Zealand wanted them to swallow.
Until we put our money were our mouth is, we just won’t be trusted. And until we are trusted, we won’t be able to broker any deal - let alone a meaningful deal with ecological integrity. For better or worse, developing countries see us as closely aligned with the USA and Australia - and so they just don’t trust us. We, and the other developed states - especially Anglo developed states - need to earn trust.
There’s an underlying practical reality and ethical gap beneath this: Without finance, many of the Least Developed Countries cannot afford to feed their people now, let alone in the face of worsening climate disasters. Without funding, in the Least Developed Countries, there can be no mitigation. To the Least Developed Countries, finance is the only way forward.
2) Bury the annexes
This one will be an easier rat for New Zealand to swallow. The annexes that listed rich and poor countries have done their dash. It’s time to put them to bed. When you line up the world’s countries by their per capita emissions, only two of the top ten polluters are in Annex One, whether or not you factor in land use changes. We cannot let the public or our diplomats equate the Annex firewall to the differentiation part of common but differentiated responsibility. There’s more than one way to differentiate between appropriate responses.
Just as the UN Security Council’s permanent members system locks geopolitical power as at 1945, the Annex system locks the legal recognition of economic development and historical responsibility as at 1990.
There’s a rare agreement on this between the most and least developed countries on this one. If New Zealand and Afghanistan can agree on something, it’s probably worth thinking about. It in China’s interests, and those of the other BASIC countries in transition to retain the Annexes, along with many others inside and outside the G77.
But it’s not in the interests of getting a deal in Paris with ecological integrity.
So the annexes must go.
Pingback: industrial building for sale()
Pingback: friv games()