Continuing climate talks
By Shahid Javed Burki
Monday, 20 Dec, 2010
PAKISTAN, in spite of all the environmental problems it faces, has given the subject little thought. It has done little to address the various types of environmental degradation it is experiencing – air and water pollution in the major cities, and contamination of water used for irrigation, accumulation of solid waste in urban areas and general deterioration in the standards of hygiene.
There is not much recognition that the country will have to deal with the melting of the Himalayan glaciers as a result of global warming. Pakistan’s exporters will have to contend with the increasing rigorous environmental requirements by the importers of the country’s products.
Islamabad has been absent from the international scene, particularly from the series of conferences that began in Copenhagen last year, concluded at Cancun in Mexico on December 11, 2010 (and will be held in Durban South Africa in 2012).
These meetings are intended to lend more substance to the Kyoto protocol which requires that most wealthy nations to trim emissions while providing assistance to developing countries to pursue a cleaner energy future. Pakistani delegations have attended the conferences but made little contribution to their deliberations.
After signing the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 – a protocol that was not endorsed by the United States under President George W. Bush – the signatories agreed to meet every year under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. But there was a problem with the adopted approach: Under the framework any of the more than 190 participating nations can hold up an agreement. It is this provision that has made it so difficult to arrive at binding international treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol. These meetings and others before them were held under the auspices of the UN supported Conference of Parties.
Lack of resolve and action will mean that poor countries and emerging economies of South Asia will suffer much more than rich nations and their people. Rising sea waters will render large chunks of Bangladesh’s coastal planes inhabitable. Tens of millions of people will be displaced; many will seek to find new homes in the already crowded parts of east India. India too will suffer – as will Pakistan – from the premature melting of the Himalayan glaciers that feed the large rivers of the two countries.
Climate experts believe that unusual weather patterns will become common. The floods that wrecked a good part of Pakistan will become more frequent. South Asia, in other words, will have to pay a heavy economic price for climate change produced by actions in the world’s more advanced countries. There was a hope that the promise made at Kyoto to develop a more comprehensive approach to solve this problem would be realised. That did not happen at Copenhagen in late 2009 and did not happen again in Cancun, Mexico in 2010.
For the second time in a year, world leaders failed to produce a comprehensive agreement on preventing global warming from reaching the point from which it would be exceedingly difficult and costly to pull back. At Copenhagen in December 2009, the 15th meeting after the Kyoto Protocol, the main stumbling block was China’s refusal to ac cept a mechanism that would allow the international community to verify the implementation of targets set internationally. At Cancun, the scene of the 16th meeting, Beijing appeared to soften its position, recognising perhaps that since Copenhagen it had leapfrogged over the United States to become the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases.
As the Cancun conference drew to a close, China and the United States appeared to be reaching an agreement for ensuring that all nations would adhere to their pledges to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat trapping gases. According to one account, the Chinese signalled a willingness to sign an accord at Cancun as long as it met their “objectives on financial aid to developing countries, transfer of clean energy technology to poor nations and a continuing of discussions under the Kyoto Protocol”.
Most developing countries insisted that targets be set and the money should continue to flow to them for projects that contribute to global warming. Japan surprised the conferees at Cancun that it would not accept any new targets under the Kyoto Protocol and Russia, Canada and some other parties to the protocol also signalled a reluctance to assume new commitments.
The developing world came with a sense of urgency to Cancun. This was heightened by the release of a report by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies which showed that “the past 12 months had produced the highest land temperatures ever recorded. The data mean that 2010 is likely to pass 2005 as the warmest ever since detailed records have been kept…The year was marked by extreme weather events, from a recordbreaking heat wave in Russia in July to the dramatic floods in Pakistan. High sea temperatures were also blamed for a global bleaching of coral reefs.” The pledges that had been made to deal individually with the matter fell well short of ensuring global temperatures don’t exceed 3.6 degrees. Celsius above pre-industrial levels which many scientists agree could be significant tipping point for a number of developing countries. Small island nations were particularly concerned; 43 of them, including, Maldives, threatened by rising sea levels went to the Cancun meetings in the form of a group determined to get some help from the international community.
There was an expectation when the international community gathered in Copenhagen in late 2009 that a successor to the landmark 1997 Kyoto Protocol would be renegotiated before it expires in 2012. For the moment, this is the only legally binding international accord aimed at reducing greenhouse gases. It was expected that at Copenhagen – if not there then at Cancun – agreement will be reached on a “common path for cutting the world’s carbon output, dole out key nations’ specific obligations and create a common market for trading greenhouse emissions. That vision has evaporated, replaced by a much looser web of climate-related efforts across the globe.” It was this “frustration that the UN climate negotiations were not producing real-world results, individual nations, states and businesses are cobbling together patch-work solutions to preserve forests, produce clean energy and scrub pollution from the air. Under this approach, businesses in California will offset their greenhouse gas emissions by funding tropical-forest preservation in Mexico and Brazil, Japan will pay for nuclear power plants in developing nations, and South Korea will in vest in promoting renewable energy at home.” The meeting in Cancun began with modest aims and ended with modest achievements. But according to one assessment, “while the measures adopted here may have scant near-term impact on the warming of the planet, the international process for dealing with the issue got a significant vote of confidence. The agreement fell well short of the broad changes, scientists say, are needed to avoid dangerous climate change in coming decades. But it lays the groundwork for strong measures in the future if nations are able to overcome emotional arguments that have crippled climate change negotiations in recent years.” The Cancun Accord sets up a new fund to help poor countries adopt to climate changes, creates new mechanisms for clean energy technology, provides compensation for the preservation of tropical forests and strengthens the emissions reduction pledges that were incorporated in last year’s Copenhagen Accord. Rich countries promised to provide $100 billion in annual climate related aid but it was left open as to where that money will come from.
There is enough in the Cancun Accord for Pakistan to benefit from but it will need a great deal of work by Islamabad working with the provinces to draw up an integrated programme for mitigating the effects of climate change – a programme that has the potential of receiving international financial and technical aid promised under the accord.