Who says our governments aren’t serious about saving the world from a climatic Armageddon? You’ve only got to remember that Doha 2012, their latest conclave that took place in the Qatari capital from November 26 to December 7, was COP 18 – the 18th Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – and CMP 8, or the 8th session of the Conference of Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol, combined. That’s to say, it had been preceded by 17 COPs and seven CMPs — at each of which the defenders of our environment had fought their battle of words with impressive sound and fury. If that’s not dedication, what is?
That’s not all. As of Doha 2012, the Clean Development Mechanism Executive Board had met 70 times; the Subsidiary Body for Implementation 37 times; the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice 37 times; the Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex 1 Countries Under the Kyoto Protocol (Second Part) 17 times; and the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-Term Cooperative Action under the Convention (Second Part) 15 times.
And only last June, the heads of state from 192 countries shed all other businesses to travel once again to the Brazilian city of Rio in search of “the future we want” and “a pathway for a sustainable century”. That was Rio+20. Ten years before that, there was Rio+10. Go back another 10 years, to 1992, and you’ll hit Base Rio, where all the huffing and puffing began, UNFCCC came to be born, and Agenda 21 was proclaimed, setting the global environmental agenda for the next two decades. Wasn’t that something?
Results? Who wants results? It’s the intention that matters, the commitment that counts. If promises were to be taken seriously and fulfiled, what would be left to huff and puff over? There won’t be any need any more to travel to summits and conferences and committee meetings. But travel we must to keep renewing our pledges. Remember what UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon said at the close of Rio+20? “The road ahead is going to be long and hard.” He spoke our mind.
Let’s look back to where we started, to 1985, when the Vienna convention for the protection of the ozone layer was signed. It took three more years to come into force. Then, there was the Montreal Protocol of 1987 for the same purpose, and we kept working on it through seven revisions. We followed it up with the Rio Summit of 1992, the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, Rio+10 at Johannesburg in 2002, the Copenhagen Accord in 2009, the Green Climate Fund for $100 billion per year in 2010, the Durban Platform in 2011 seeking a fresh, post-Kyoto Protocol to be in force by 2020. Then, of course, there was Rio+20. Throw in all COPs and CMPs in between, including the latest sessions in Doha, and you get an idea of the labour we’ve already gone through.
And the battle hasn’t begun yet. That’s to say, we don’t know our own minds yet. We’ve to settle that first. Then, we must fix our strategies. At the same time, we must watch out for negotiating traps and avoid getting into a bind. This means we must hold conferences and keep talking, form committees and sub-committees and sub-sub-committees to go into finer details, and never rush into decisions. When our very future is at stake, can we afford to be casual? But that doesn’t mean we aren’t aware of our mission. At Rio+20, we did what we were expected to do: renewed our political commitments all over again and reaffirmed all our previous action plans. What more could we do?
So, don’t worry about Armageddon. We’ll keep talking till we find a solution. Don’t be daunted by the fact that the world’s population has been rising steadily – it was 5.4 billion at the time of Rio 1992 and is seven billion now – deepening our sustainability concerns. Just remember that our talks have been progressing at the same furious rate, too. When the figure reaches 7.5 billion in 2020, as demographers predict, or 8.2 billion in 2030, we’ll still be talking. If floods become more frequent, typhoons become severer, crops fail, glaciers recede, or sea levels rise, we’ll still be studying issues, weighing options, and trading blames.
After all, we are committed to preventing “dangerous anthropogenic interference” with our climate system. Don’t say Doha was a failure. We knew the Kyoto Protocol – the only UN plan that actually obliges developed nations to cut carbon emissions – was expiring at the end of this year, so we joined hands and had it extended till 2020. That gives us a lot of room to manoeuvre and all the time we want to put off hasty decisions, doesn’t it?