Jennifer Morgan of the World Resources Institute on the big screen in Lima.
The predicament the world finds itself in today is that we are international to the tune of 200 or so different countries. Which means, when unified global effort is required to make something happen, it's in the self-interest of each individual nation to put out the least effort and treasure.
That was at the crux of the negotiating battle at the climate talks—COP20—in Lima, Peru, these past two weeks: who should pay for reducing carbon emissions. That's actually been at the crux for decades. Should the bulk be contributed by the rich, developed nations that have built their modern economies on a century of vast emissions of greenhouse gases or should the poor, developing nations that have only recently started their ascent be forced to pay for most of this essential industrial makeover?
The rich nations, which have given lip service and a few billions of dollars to assist the poorer nations, required in Lima that everybody, poor nations as well, pledge to cut their carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels and pledge to provide measurements of what they are doing. It took four drafts before the delegates said okay.
The Lima Accord that finally emerged in the wee hours of the weekend's overtime sessions is being called "modest," "weak," "the bare minimum" by critics in the civil society organizations who attended the conference. Oxfam said "the decisions made in Lima do not foreclose the possibility of an agreement in Paris, but do little to improve the odds of success." Climate delegates are slated to meet in Paris late next year to complete a final global climate change pact.
Please read below the fold for more on this story.
By agreeing in Lima, each nation has pledged to present an emissions cutback plan in March, with a grace period until June. The resulting aggregation of plans would be the foundation of the long-sought global pact. But this breakthrough in the Lima talks has one very big problem. The pledges are voluntary. There's no punishment for failing to meet them. There is, so far, no comment metric for determining whether a nation has failed. No formal arrangement for measurements. This lack of an adequate enforcement and measurement regime was the chosen path to a final document because it was the only way negotiators could get everybody to sign on.
While there were cheers among the delegates, critics were not in short supply. Samantha Smith, chief of climate policy for the World Wide Fund for Nature, came down hard on the vague language of the pact.
"This is an incredibly weak text," she said. Even though governments and sleep-deprived delegates tried to put a positive spin on the deal, many analysts warned the whole thing was simply too weak to have any real effect. “We went from weak to weaker to weakest," [she] said of all the draft documents that came out of the Lima talks.
Brandon Wu of
gets the prize for
condensing succinctly the litany of flaws in what came out of Lima:
“We wanted three primary things from Lima: clear indications of how developed countries would scale up climate finance leading up to the promised $100bn per year in 2020; assurance that “loss and damage” would be a core pillar of the new climate regime to be decided in 2015; and concrete commitments to reduce emissions in the immediate short term (pre-2020). Lima delivered none of these things.
“For developing countries this was no outcome at all. There is no new money to help them adapt to climate impacts or transition to cleaner economies. There is no assurance that they will be supported in their efforts to deal with loss and damage. And hope is rapidly fading that developed countries will act urgently to reduce their emissions to stop the climate crisis from getting worse.
“The bright side was that social movements, NGOs, development professionals and other members of civil society (including laboir unions, youth, indigenous peoples, women and gender organisations) were virtually united in speaking the truth about the Lima talks: that while governments might hail it as a step forward, however tentative, in reality the talks delivered nothing at a time when taking action is becoming increasingly urgent, especially for the poorest and most vulnerable.
“The recent mobilisations in New York and Lima – in which impacted people were front and centre – show that there’s a growing understanding that climate change is not just an issue for environmentalists, but one that affects everyone’s lives, livelihoods, and human rights. The work we have to do moving forward is to capitalise on this momentum and build the power we need to force our governments to tackle this issue with the urgency and seriousness that science and justice demand.”
But some of the critics say they still see some positive glimmers. John H. Cushman Jr. at Inside Climate News
notes:
The documents finally drafted here were too full of ifs, ands and buts to be considered a landmark accomplishment.
Some provisions were so watered down as to be essentially toothless. […]
But the road to Paris remains open. "A global climate agreement is now within reach," said Jennifer Morgan, director of the World Resources Institute's climate program. The deal "keeps us on track to Paris but also signals a tough year ahead," said Elliot Diringer of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions.
Tick, tock.