The Durban climate change conference — the 17th conference of parties — has ended, after grueling and acrimonious negotiations on how the world would cut carbon dioxide emissions that are linked to growth, but are also now jeopardising its future because of catastrophic weather changes. It ended with a package of decisions called the Durban Platform, which includes the mandate to start negotiations on a future agreement with more aggressive emission reduction targets to keep the world's average temperature increase below 2°C or 1.5°C — a critical threshold if we are to keep the world from catastrophic climate changes.
The big fight — and a nasty one — was on the matter of whether this agreement would be legally binding on all countries or not. India, which opposed a legally binding agreement, was put into the dock. The Western media singled out India as the deal-breaker and condemned it as a country wanting its right to pollute.
But was the issue as simple as it was made out to be? When negotiations on climate change began over 20 years ago, it was well understood that the industrialised world — contributor to 70-80 per cent of the stock of emissions in the atmosphere — had to vacate space for the emerging world to grow. The deal also was that money and technology transfer would enable emerging countries to avoid future emissions growth. But none of this happened. Meagre targets were set; the US and other big polluters walked out of the agreement. The funds never came.
This deal was critical because if the already rich emitted in the past, the emerging rich will emit in the future. We know carbon dioxide emissions are linked to economic growth as the world imagines it today. We also know the road to a low-carbon economy is bumpy and costly. If the world is indeed serious about an agreement to cut emissions, it has to accept there will be limits for all — past polluters and future contributors. This agreement will only work if it is based on equal entitlements to atmospheric space. But at Durban, rich countries wanted to brush aside this principle.
Therefore, the move was to surreptitiously change the nature of the agreement itself: to create a single legally binding agreement for all countries, which would remove the differentiation between the contributors to the problem of climate change and the rest. It would wipe out countries' historical contribution, and be based only on the remaining carbon budget if the world has to keep the 2°C temperature cap. This would freeze inequity in the world, and compromise the right to development of the emerging countries.
This was the battle of Durban. The final outcome is mixed; there is hope, as well as a mirror to the challenge ahead. Because of the fight-back by countries like India (backed by China, South Africa and even a hesitant Brazil), the final decision is that instead of a legally binding agreement, the future outcome could be a range of options. These include a process to develop a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force.
The conference has agreed to fast-track these negotiations, saying that work should be completed by 2015, so that this new agreement or outcome can be implemented from 2020. Now the challenge will be to ensure that this future agreement accounts for the historical and current emissions of countries in setting targets. The conference has also included, in its future work programme, the Indian submission to re-focus on the issue of equity and burden sharing. So the fight for an effective and equitable climate agreement has only just begun.
The meeting has also agreed to the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, again a key demand of developing countries. The next challenge will be to set quantified emission reduction targets for all industrialised countries so that they can, by 2020, reduce emissions between 25 and 40 per cent below 1990 levels. More importantly, this second phase must do away with the now-infamous Kyoto loopholes where creative ways of accounting appear to “reduce” emissions.
The third big delivery of the conference is to set up a Green Climate Fund to pay for mitigation and adaptation in vulnerable countries. But this fund is without any money, as the industrialised countries say that the recession means that they cannot pay. The big question is how and what innovative sources of financing can be found to pay for the necessary transition.
I see the Durban climate conference as an important turning point. At this conference, the matter of equity has been re-asserted; but the open resistance of the rich countries to sharing global ecological and economic space has also been noted. The fight is out in the open. It would be important now to ensure that the South Africa-hosted Durban Platform does not end up deepening climate apartheid.
