Climate Gateway to nowhere

The political reality of climate change has yet again failed to meet the need of the hour. The latest round of climate change negotiations (COP 18) that just concluded in Doha failed to come to grips with the gravity of nature’s warning and proved to be as inconsequential as had been feared. No real commitments pledged, no real finance delivered and, most importantly, no real leadership. The momentum in the climate talks which lost its way a few years ago at Copenhagen has failed to be reignited. This year at Doha the negotiations really seemed to be desperately searching for relevance.

The irony is that this fading global response is now totally out of sync with the increasing physical reality and urgency of a changing climate, which is constantly threatening nature’s status quo. The US East Coast is still reeling from the fury unleashed by Hurricane Sandy, while unprecedented floods were wreaking havoc in the Philippines as the global political actors huddled for more talks in the corridors of the climate meeting at Doha. Nature’s alarm bells could not influence the circus of political negotiations that are now increasingly getting divorced from reality.

The timid outcome of the two-week talks was a well-rehearsed final marathon session which culminated with the COP chairman rapidly hammering through a set of decisions termed “Doha Climate Gateway.” What is strikingly obvious from this document is that the two much-needed targets of raising the ambition of the climate polluting developed countries and of honouring their oft-repeated promise of delivering adequate climate finance to developing countries both remain missing.

Outside the negotiation rooms, however, climate change has forcibly dictated its own set of rules and costs. While the last three years of climate negotiations have fought over how, when, by whom and to whom the promised figure of $100 billion in climate change finance would be delivered, Hurricane Sandy alone billed the world’s largest climate polluter, and also the most obstinate negotiator, to a figure of $100 billion in damages. That is the irony of nature’s fury.

What the Doha meeting did manage to do was extend a last-minute lifeline to the Kyoto Protocol, which would have otherwise expired at the end of 2012. The 1997 Kyoto Treaty had obliged 35 developed countries to curb their carbon emissions by an average of at least 5.2 percent below 1990 levels during the four-year period of 2008-2012. Even though the last few years saw the unceremonious exit of Russia, Japan and Canada from it, the Kyoto Protocol still survives as the only legally binding instrument in the climate arena and, backed primarily by promised deeper emission cuts from the EU and Australia, has now been extended by another elongated eight-year term.

This will allow carbon trading to further expand and use the markets to shift economic growth onto a low-carbon trajectory, particularly in developing countries where most of this growth is set to happen. The real credibility of this extension depends on the emissions targets that the developed countries voluntarily choose to take upon themselves. This essential element has been left open-ended, however, with more negotiations to happen in the coming year.

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