Copenhagen reveals nations are worlds apart - Patriot News

Copenhagen reveals nations are worlds apart - Patriot News
By Patriot-News Op-Ed
December 24, 2009, 5:30AM

There was something new in the air at the recently concluded Copenhagen climate change negotiations even though they have largely been deemed a failure.
These developments have profound implications for the international community, particularly for developed countries.

I’ve been participating in international climate change negotiating sessions since the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in 1992, including seven conferences under the United States Framework Convention on Climate Change.

I also negotiated climate change and other environmental issues for the EPA at the United Nations from 1995 to 1998.

This experience leads me to conclude that there are two big new stories that unfolded in Copenhagen: ethical dilemmas and the practicalities of adaptation.
In the past, worldwide interest on climate change negotiations was focused mainly on national emissions targets.

The first new issue is the frequency and centrality in which arguments were made in Copenhagen that climate change is an ethical issue, and its solutions must be guided by ethical, justice and human rights principles and not national self-interest alone.

The Copenhagen agenda included dozens of meetings expressly devoted to the ethical dimensions of climate change.

Hundreds of delegates from poor nations whose citizens already are suffering from a warming world passionately implored rich nations to take action sufficient to protect the vulnerable.

They described killer droughts and growing deserts in Africa, loss of glacier-fed water supplies for millions in Central Asia and South America, and rising seas that are now threatening the existence of small island states. For many poor countries, climate change is an urgent matter of life and death.

Despite the growing recognition that climate change is an ethical matter, many developed nations continued to negotiate as if national economic interest alone was a sufficient justification for national positions.

In fact, no developed nation put on the table a commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that was congruent with what science is now saying is necessary to protect those most vulnerable from dangerous climate change.

President Obama was constrained by domestic politics because he could not commit to emissions reduction levels that had little chance of passing in Congress. Yet many in the rest of the world saw the U.S. position as based upon narrow U.S. economic interest, not duties to poor people.

The United States was willing to commit to a 17 percent reduction below 2005, which equaled a 4 percent reduction below 1990 levels.

Yet recent science has concluded that the world needs to reduce global emissions by 25 percent to 40 percent below 1990 by 2020 to avoid dangerous climate change. From the standpoint of the most vulnerable poor countries, the U.S. position amounted to a death sentence.

The United States was not alone.

When Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd arrived in Copenhagen, he announced that he was not going to sign any agreement that was not in Australia’s interest.

The second big item that happened in Copenhagen was the huge blossoming of climate change damage issues. All of a sudden, the world has awakened to specific adaptation questions such as who is going to pay for climate change damages? How should these monies be administered? To whom should they go? How to set priorities among adaptation needs? And how much money will be made available for growing adaptation needs?

From the standpoint of the poorest developing countries, adaptation issues have been a high priority for some time, but now they have become critical.
dbrown.jpgDonald Brown

The proposed negotiating text called for developed countries to finance several adaptation needs of poor countries including: (a) vulnerability assessments, (b) national adaptation planning, (c) project adaptation implementation, (d) new international and regional adaptation bodies, and (e) pay for all of this with mandatory, new, and predictable funding. The proposed text also called for funding in the range of $70 to $140 billion per year until 2020 and then updated after that.

Although President Obama managed to get an agreement among a few of the larger polluting countries, this deal does not have the support of most developing countries, nor is it likely to be a blueprint for a future global deal.

Copenhagen did not produce the deal hoped for by many because developed and developing countries are on a different track. The developing countries want justice and the developed countries want to protect their economic interests.

Donald Brown is assistant professor of environmental ethics, science and law at Penn State University.