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Archive for December 2011

Rolling the dice at Durban

by CAHA
December 9th, 2011

By Fiona Armstrong December 9th, 2011

 In the final week in Durban a sense of frustration is permeating the COP, where aspirations for a global  deal remain high, but expectations swing between mildly hopeful and almost absent.

The tone of the Australian delegation is one of determined but checked progress, maintaining there will be positive outcomes on some issues while keeping expectations low.

Australia continues its dream run in terms of public sentiment here, where many international delegates are under the impression that Australia’s carbon price legislation has real significance in terms of emissions reductions, seemingly unaware of the tiny step it actually represents. Still, the misconception is creating goodwill and perhaps even pressure on other countries to commit to binding targets at the international level, so what is lacking in policy efficacy is being made up in PR kudos, at least for now.

In terms of progress in the discussions, China is signalling a openness to legally binding obligations but stonewalling by New Zealand, Canada, Russia, the US and Japan means there is little hope of any final decisions on legal form. Many negotiating efforts by the big polluting nations appear to be about delaying decisions for as long as possible, with the staggeringly irresponsible date of 2020 for mandatory emissions cuts being advocated by the US.

The options currently being pursued range from: retaining some aspects of the Kyoto Protocol, but with limits to offsets, greatly enhanced measurement, verification and reporting, and the development of a new legally binding instrument to be agreed at COP18; to securing some agreement on mitigation measures but with the decision on legal form delayed until 2020. A review of global targets is being proposed to raise the level of commitments, but India, the US and China all want that delayed until after a scientific review slated for 2015.

Filling the coffers of the Green Climate Fund, for adaptation and mitigation in developing nations agreed to at Cancun, is also proving difficult; promised funds are failing to materialise and many nations are reluctant to name the figure they will commit in order to realise the agreed goal of $US100 billion per year by 2020.

Hopes of a fast start, that would see substantial funds committed between 2010 and 2012, are now looking a bit shaky. Ensuring these funds are a) delivered and b) new and additional (i.e. not rebadged aid funding) is the main game. Too little discussion has been had about additional ways of raising funds, however redirecting fossil fuel subsidies is an obvious choice, with the Robin Hood tax (a minuscule tax on financial transactions that could potentially raise US$400 billion a year) another obvious contender.

Bad behaviour by countries here at the COP is rewarded with the title of “fossil of the day“. Winners to date include: Turkey (for its 98 per cent growth in emissions post 1990 plus seeking Kyoto $ to spend on coal and roads); the US (for turning up but only wanting to discuss climate action in nine years time); Canada (for refusing to cooperate with just about everything); and New Zealand and Russia (joint first place for wanting to benefit from Kyoto but not be bound by it).

In the meantime, global emissions increased 6 per cent last year and millions of hectares of forests disappeared. The rate of global deforestation is 14.5 million hectares each year, as forests are converted to agricultural land to feed the inexorably rising global human population.

The gap between reality and commitment makes these a rather surreal set of discussions, the nature of which is well captured in this quote from Climate Action Network Australia Director Georgina Woods:

“We are all struggling to find a way to describe the kind of banal failure that is at risk of emerging here. I arrived steeled for major drama, hysterics and intensity; what’s happening instead is potentially worse – a slide into oblivion masked by the veneer of progress. Because there certainly is progress. The LCA text [long term cooperative action] represents a huge amount of work by negotiators in the last 12 months, and encompasses many things that the people of the world need and want to deal with climate change… and yet… putting off the major decisions… leaves open the possibility that they will find the important decisions all too hard, and find shelter together in their cowardice, and guiltily cobble together agreements that have the semblance of cooperation, but do not change the trajectory we are already on: towards a four degrees warmer world.”

Current existing pledges fall well short of what the science indicates is needed to give us only a modest chance (66 per cent) of limiting warming to 2°C (itself a target that is not considered desirable or safe), so it’s no wonder a lot of talk here is focusing on the ‘gigatonne’ gap, or emissions gap, that exists between pledges and the actual emissions cuts needed. Global emissions leapt in 2010, but a recent UNEP report says this puts us on track to be 12 gigatonnes (Gt) of CO2e over what we can afford to emit if the world is to have any hope of staying below 2ºC, a goal described by NASA climate scientist Jim Hansen as a recipe for disaster.

What do we really want from Durban? Ideally, Ministers would go home having agreed to a multilateral approach to addressing climate change, with a combination of legally binding instruments, decisions, rules and guidelines. These should be, in the words of the COP President, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, South Africa’s International Relations Minister, “pragmatic, effective, timely and appropriate.” This would require documented commitments for which there are consequences if countries fail to keep them: mechanisms for ensuring emissions trajectories are consistent with the timeframe that science indicates; sufficient climate financing for developing nations to adapt as well as begin their own low carbon transitions; and action from all countries, led by the industrialised nations.

It’s not the case that there have been no genuine efforts to reach agreement. Indeed it seems there has been many constructive discussions, some of which may well have been influenced by the COP President’s invocation of ‘Indabas’ – a traditional form of South African participatory democracy in which people come together in the spirit of ‘Ubuntu,’ being motivated by the common good, to discuss a matter of great importance and to solve intractable or difficult collective problems in ways that benefit the community as a whole. (Sound familiar?)

So, what have we got without a global deal?

It seems increasingly likely that we will see emerging cooperation between nation states, as bilateral and regional deals are made. Some pressure may come from developing nations who refuse to provide offsets for wealthier countries who fail to act. Aside from those, we are left, largely, to rely on domestic policy commitments to deliver emissions reductions and the hope that commercial competitiveness and the actions of individual nation states will deliver a sufficiently broad rollout of clean renewable energy to see emissions peak in the timeframe left to avert runaway climate change.

The German Advisory Council (WGBU) remains cautiously optimistic this can be achieved and is working to facilitate that by offering a roadmap for a transformation to sustainability to any country or group of countries willing to take the lead. Their Social Contract for Sustainability offers willing leaders the opportunity to showcase how ambitious and committed actions can create a new pact for sustainability and demonstrate how breaking away from existing destructive pathways can deliver greater equity, social wellbeing, and economic security.

WGBU estimates the global cost of transformation would require $US200-$US1000 billion a year by 2030. This may seem a massive investment, but one they consider manageable through innovative business and financing models. They warn if it is not made, the costs associated with the economic, environmental and social disruption that a wildly unstable climate would be much, much more.

To create a bit of perspective, we already spend $500 billion globally each year on fossil fuel subsidies – a source of finance that would be more usefully deployed in a renewable energy transformation than driving dangerous climate change and causing millions of deaths from harmful air pollution.

In light of a less than optimum outcome from our governments, it’s encouraging other actors are not only envisioning but developing the roadmaps we need as a global community to reverse our current destructive path and shape a new future for our planet and our species.

But we should also prepare to be surprised, in the hope that those negotiators in Durban will reveal their hands as stronger than we thought. After all, they won’t be revealing all their cards till the very last. And before they do, may we hope they recall the words of that esteemed South African, Nelson Mandela, when he said: “It always seems impossible, until it is done.”

Categories Advocacy, Climate, Health, Uncategorized
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Where’s health at the COP?

by cahaorg
December 7th, 2011
By Maya Tickell-Painter
In another post, I wrote about why health professionals should care about climate change. Luckily, it seems that I’m not the only one who’s thought of this- more than ever before, health professionals are present and engaging with the UN climate talks.
During this conference, there have been 6 official side events, two health-related actions, and numerous other informal and peer-to-peer education sessions. But are negotiators giving health the love which health professionals are giving to climate change?

Historically, involvement of health has been minimal. The original 1992 UNFCCC text has only two token mentions of health, the Kyoto Protocol has zero, and the Cancun Adaptation Framework has one – in a footnote. Negotiations for this year haven’t finished yet, but so far there hasn’t been significant progress in the inclusion of health.

This could cut both ways- health professionals have previously lacked meaningful engagement on climate change issues. But now so many things are happening to highlight that this isn’t the case.

There is now a large volume of high quality data that maps the many threats to human health and wellbeing that are posed by climate change; the World Health Organisation predicts that climate change is currently causing 150,000 deaths per year.

Each year, about 1.2 million people die from causes attributable to urban air pollution, 2.2 million from diarrhoea largely resulting from lack of access to clean water supply and sanitation, 3.5 million from malnutrition and approximately 60 000 in natural disasters. Climate change will exacerbate each of these existing disease burdens.

In addition, the health impacts will predominantly affect the poorest and most vulnerable worldwide – women and children, the elderly, and those living in extreme poverty- those who have contributed least to the causes of climate change.

Expanding our knowledge, however, is not enough. Unless a dramatic change in events occurs during the next 2 days, it is unlikely that the world will see a legally binding global deal before 2020. And the science now unequivocally tells us that this is too late to avoid catastrophic climate change. Therefore, as a global community we will need to increase our capacity to adapt to the changes which climate change will bring.

In this area, the health profession will be crucial. A lack of involvement of health professionals within adaptation programmes, particularly under the Adaptation Committee, could have wide reaching and devastating effects on population health. Additionally, health is a tangible concept, which communities and individuals are easily able to envisage. Therefore, the use of health indicators to measure the impacts of climate change could act as an urgently required impetus for action.

A lack of action by the negotiators at Durban would make it more, not less, important for health professionals to engage on climate change issues. It will be our patients who will be suffering the consequences in the years to come.

Maya Tickell-Painter is a fourth year medical student currently studying in Brighton, UK. She travelled to the COP 17 conference in Durban as a representative of Medsin, the UK student global health organisation. This blog first appeared on the Adopt-A-Negotiator website on 7th December 2011.

Categories Advocacy, Climate, Health
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COPping the heat (and the procrastination) in Durban

by cahaorg
December 3rd, 2011

By Fiona Armstrong

The beachside city of Durban is packed, with 10,000 people from 194 countries in town for the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to negotiate the next step in the process of the United Nations Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

It’s also the 7th meeting of the parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP7), the mechanism through which the Protocol is implemented, and the central subject of this meeting, as nations wrestle with what arrangements can be put in place to replace or extend the agreements under the Protocol which expires in 2012.

The focus to date has been on drafting, negotiating and agreeing proposals for each country’s Ministers to use when they begin to negotiate the shape of the new commitments next week. There are concurrent discussions on the mitigation efforts agreed in Cancun last year, outstanding commitments from the Bali Action Plan of 2007, and intense discussions on both the volume and rate at which contributions to the Green Climate Fund are delivered to assist developing nations cut emissions and adapt to climate change.

Several countries, including Australia have put forward proposals for a new treaty that would provide for implementation of the Convention post 2012. Ideally, this would also cover the commitments being negotiated under the Long term Cooperative Action (LCA) plans begun at Cancun, which includes mitigation strategies by countries such as the US currently outside the Kyoto Protocol.

In a demonstration of negative peer influence, US recalcitrance is now being echoed by its northern neighbours, Canada, who earned themselves “fossil of the day” award on day one of the negotiations by indicating their intention to withdraw from the Protocol when it expires next year. This surprised no-one, as Canada has been falling short of their commitments for some time, but their hostility to the process was somewhat unprecedented, given the comments by the Canadian Environment Minister that signing Kyoto has been “one of the biggest blunders” ever made by their national government.

The glaring chasm in the discussions is the gap between stated commitments of countries to cut emissions and those recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 4th Assessment Report (and confirmed by more recent evaluations, such as the Australian Climate Commission’s Critical Decade report in May). (This ‘discrepancy’ was acknowledged in the Cancun Agreements, but subsequent indications of willingness to act and the negotiations here suggest there is a widespread delusional disorder among many nations that postponement will not carry profound risk and that delay due to poor political appetite is somehow justified).

Other issues being negotiated here include the establishment of common accounting methods for measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) of emissions reduction efforts, including international offsets. This is key to transparency and accountability, and a vital underpinning of any international agreement. There is much that is unknown about many of these commitments to date however (eg how emissions will be achieved, what gases will be covered, what accounting systems, and what sectors will be covered).

In the meantime, many nongovernment organisations (NGOs) are focussing on the kinds of climate change issues that affect the welfare of people – trade, markets, gender, global justice, finance, and health.

Health is receiving more attention than at previous COPs, with the largest ever health delegation to attend the international climate talks in Durban. There are scores of health organisations from more than 30 countries and dozens of health-related side events. Over 200 delegates will attend the Global Climate and Health Summit on Sunday where the establishment of a global climate and health coalition is proposed.

Mentions of health in the negotiating texts are few and far between however, but health NGOs are working hard here to encourage countries to embed health messages into the discussions and stated ambitions, by highlighting the serious and increasing risks to health from climate change, as well as the substantial and immediate benefits to health from strategies to reduce emissions.

Australia’s role appears more cooperative rather than at earlier meetings, and the delegation coasting on a bit of goodwill for getting some form of climate policy legislation passed. Questions are still being raised however about its role in holding out for a loophole in the rules for land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF) which allows Australia log and burn native forests without having to account for the emissions this causes.

And there is no room for complacency in assuming the Clean Energy Future legislation is anywhere near enough for Australia to meet its obligations: a study out this week shows Australia needs to do much more to meet even its own 5% by 2020 target, much less the ambitious reductions required to keep warming stays below 2°C agreed to in Cancun, or the 1.5°C maximum sought by Pacific and some African nations.

Along with most other nations, Australia needs to substantially raise its ambition. This requires much stronger targets: its contribution to the global task of emissions reductions must be consistent with its emissions profile as well as a fair share of the global task – cognisant of the commitments already in place from other countries.

Its important to be aware that many other countries are meeting their (admittedly inadequate) Kyoto commitments and many are implementing climate policy: eleven other nations with whom Australia trades now have a price on carbon; fourteen have renewable energy targets; many more have policies such as emissions performance standards, feed-tariffs, and subsidies or incentives for energy efficiency or renewable energy technology. Despite having been hit by the eurozone crunch much harder than Australia, the UK, for example, is still committed to reductions of 50% by 2020. Global investment in renewable energy hit US$211 billion in 2010 and this despite the global economic downturn.

The key messages from NGOs here in Durban are that:

  • Australia’s current target is inadequate;
  • other countries are taking action;
  • strong domestic national policy is key to other countries taking action: and
  • there are important national benefits for emissions reductions that are available immediately.

But Australian officials need to do a better job both here in Durban and at home to create a compelling narrative for strong climate action. There are many ‘frames’ through which climate action can be positively viewed i.e. benefits to health, risk management, and low carbon market opportunities – all of which are real, and available right now.

The community must be made aware of the opportunities; and the consequences of further delay. And distortions of the science by those with vested interests must be exposed, as one presentation here today suggested for the “assault on humanity” that it is.
While many of the negotiations here are taking place behind closed doors, there is a vital role for observers in tracking progress and spreading the word on how the talks progress.

As these talks continue, I hope people back at home are following, and letting their representatives know that they expect a positive outcome. Time is short: very short, according to the recent International Energy Agency report.

Please don’t switch off, Australia – we’ll all COP it if you do.

This post also appears on Shaping Tomorrows World.

Categories Climate
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