Letdown at Cancun

The climate conference failed to deliver an effective and equitable agreement on reducing emissions and will aggravate global warming.

SO low were the expectations from the global climate negotiations after last year's disastrous Copenhagen summit that nobody thought its successor conference would be a thundering game-changing success. Yet, not many expected the Cancun conference to legitimise the core negative features of the Copenhagen Accord, such as the measly offers of the industrialised northern countries on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. These pledges will lead to global warming of 3.2 to 4C, perhaps even higher, well beyond the 1.5 to 2C that scientists regard as the very maximum Planet Earth can tolerate.

The accord was a collusive arrangement between the United States and BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India and China), later signed by 20-odd states. It crossed many red lines drawn by the developing-country bloc of Group of 77+China and could not be adopted by the conference. India and China did not even mention the accord in their official climate action reports to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The WikiLeaks cables reveal that the North had to bully and blackmail many vulnerable states of the South to sign on to the Copenhagen Accord as a precondition for aid to fight climate change.

However, regrettably, the Cancun Agreements incorporate the substance of the Copenhagen Accord and lay the basis for reversing some of the major gains of the UNFCCC process, including the Kyoto Protocol, the world's sole legally binding climate agreement, which mandates time-bound, quantified, country-specific emissions reductions for the North.

One reason why the agreements were greeted by most countries barring Bolivia was that almost every group of players got some short-term benefits from them. The most vulnerable group, the very vocal Association of Small Island States, secured an adaptation plan and got promises of funding for it. Many other southern countries were pleased at the establishment of a $100-billion Green Climate Fund although it remains unclear where the money will come from. The South's emerging powers were relieved that they only had to accept light climate-related obligations and can thus continue along their high-GDP (gross domestic product) and -emissions growth path.

Most important, the big northern countries were happy because the agreements make light of their duty to combat climate change in proportions commensurate with their responsibility for causing it and to assist the South with finance and technology to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Cancun has put the Kyoto Protocol on life support and greatly diluted the North-South differentiation in responsibility, accepted by the UNFCCC and stressed in the Bali Action Plan (2007).

The agreement's long-term effect will be terrible for Planet Earth. The North's voluntary pledges to cut emissions by 13 to 16 per cent by 2020, instead of the 40 per cent necessary, will probably lead to catastrophic climate change with the destruction of whole ecosystems, submergence of countries, crippling food shortages and extensive economic damage. As Bolivia's articulate negotiator Pablo Solon put it: I cannot in all in consciousness sign such as a document as millions of people will die as a result. The agreements, he said, represent a compromise at the expense of the victims, rather than the culprits of climate change.

PALTRY PLEDGES

Like the Copenhagen Accord, the Cancun Agreements too turn the science-based process of setting emissions-reduction targets on its head and adopt a bottom-up approach, under which countries set their own targets. The big emitters can thus get away with paltry pledges. For instance, the U.S., historically responsible for a quarter of the global stock of emissions, has offered to reduce its emissions by a measly 4 per cent by 2020 an insult to the South's poor who are the worst victims of climate change.

The agreements establish a cruel truth: the rich countries can renege on their responsibility with impunity even if that means that the earth will now hurtle towards the precipice. The greater the delay in making emissions cuts within the next five to 10 years, the greater the future burden on humanity.

Although the agreements pay lip service to a second commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol, after its first term expires in 2012, no agreement was reached on this. Japan announced that it would never agree to a second term for Kyoto: this is not a bargaining tactic, but its final view. Once Japan opened the breach, many other northern countries stepped into it. Nothing prevents them from making the least possible effort at mitigation and low-carbon technology development, and avoiding hard decisions to reduce their overconsumption, reorganise habitats and alter lifestyles.

The Cancun Agreements recognise the Copenhagen pledges. These are arbitrary and paltry. There is no way of knowing if they add up to the minimum emissions reduction necessary globally. A recent U.N. Environment Programme report says the developed countries will with their pledges reduce their emissions by only 16 per cent by 2020 in the best scenario and increase them by 6.5 per cent in a bad scenario. There remains a gap of 9 million tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions between the North's pledges and the 44 million tonnes needed to limit global warming to 2C.

The North's record on fulfilling its Kyoto first commitment period targets is appalling. Instead of reducing emissions by a modest average of 5.2 per cent by 2008-12 over 1990, as many as 17 of the 41 countries will increase their emissions by as much as 40 and 100 per cent in some cases. Many of those who met their targets did so through offsets and emissions trading, not by cutting emissions domestically.

The agreements imposed new obligations on the southern countries. They must report their national emissions and climate actions every two years in an international consultation and analysis (ICA) process. This transparency requirement represents a departure from the earlier stand of India and the G-77+China, that only those southern actions which are financially supported by the North be scrutinised. This was declared non-negotiable in the run-up to Copenhagen, where the condition was dropped. Union Minister for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh has come in for sharp criticism for proposing a compromise text on ICA. But this misses the main point, that the agreements are flawed in far more basic ways.

These negative aspects make the agreements a bad bargain not just for the South but for the prospect of fighting climate change with the urgency it demands. But they contain features that can be called positive although on balance these too are of mixed value. The agreements draw up an adaptation plan and emphasise funding for it, but without specific commitments.

GREEN CLIMATE FUND

The agreements propose the establishment of a $100-billion Green Climate Fund by 2020. But this is wholly inadequate for what is needed in the South (estimated at $500-1,000 billion annually). The fund is a distant political objective. There is no clarity on whether the money will come from the public or private sector or how much will be grants rather than loans and equity. A committee is mandated to decide this. But the fund's initial trustee will be the World Bank a demand of the U.S. and other major Western powers. The Bank has an atrocious environmental record and loans billions of dollars every year for fossil fuel burning projects.

The agreements create REDD (reduced emissions through deforestation and degradation), a market mechanism, ostensibly to promote forest conservation and reduce logging. But this is a controversial scheme, which commodifies forests. As forest and tribal rights activists have argued, this treats forests as mere stocks of carbon and does not recognise the rights of forest-dwelling communities.

The agreements expand the loopholes available to the North to avoid urgently needed mitigation. They will greatly boost carbon trading through REDD and the inclusion of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The CDM allows southern projects to earn carbon credits. The North can buy credits and evade reducing its own emissions. Concepts such as CCS are technologically unproven and carry high risks (of toxic carbon dioxide releases) and costs.

The CDM is conceptually unsound because it relies on the market to do what markets are notoriously inept at doing. No less than the former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern admits that climate change represents history's greatest market failure. The CDM has burgeoned into a scandal. The setting of emissions allowances for northern corporations under the CDM is over-generous. Many southern projects earn credits although they make no contribution to emissions reduction.

Two of India's largest CDM projects make HFC-23, a now-banned refrigerant gas, only to destroy it to earn credits running into hundreds of crores. Some sponge iron and steel plants and coal-burning power projects claim credits although they deploy widely available marginally improved technologies and involve highly emissions-intensive processes in the first place. Many projects violate the condition that they must be new, not business-as-usual: over 80 per cent of the dams earning credits in the South were already built or under construction before the CDM took effect. Carbon trading has also become a highly speculative activity, akin to subprime bank lending, and dominated by futures trading in credits, which may never materialise.

The Cancun Agreements continue with the generous hot air allowances given to Russia and Ukraine. The Kyoto targets for them were based on pre-1990 emissions. But the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) collapsed and their economies and emissions shrank. Similarly, they leave out of the reckoning emissions from shipping and aircraft fuel.

ONLY AGREEMENT POSSIBLE

Despite all these flaws and inadequacies, the Cancun Agreements have been welcomed by some analysts on the grounds of realism the best deal or the only agreement possible. But this begs the question as to why any agreement, however bad, is better than no agreement. Some others emphasise the positive psychology and optimism that prevailed over fear and despair at Cancun and underscore a certain narrowing of differences between the big actors, which made the agreements possible in the first place. They say the agreements preserved the integrity of the U.N. multilateral process.

This is only partly true and dangerously false. The agreements were reached not multilaterally but through informal discussions initially between 10 countries, and later about 50 countries. The process was similar to that followed in the World Trade Organisation (WTO), where countries are invited to small green room meetings, where informal consultations are conducted. In Cancun, such meetings were convened by the host and chair, Mexico. The final text was not produced through negotiations between the delegations and was drafted by Mexico. The delegates had only a few hours to decide on it, on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. No amendments were allowed.

This is hardly a democratic way of functioning and sets a bad precedent. Cancun is negative in yet another way. The agreements were declared passed even when one member (Bolivia) objected in violation of the rules of business that demand full agreement among all present.

PRESSURE ON INDIA

Why did India sign the Cancun Agreements in violation of its own non-negotiables: namely, a second commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol, accelerated delivery of fast-start support for the South, and technology transfer without Intellectual Property Rights restrictions? The only explanation is, a combination of external pressure and New Delhi's shrewd calculation that the agreements impose relatively light obligations on India although they place even lighter ones on the North.

This speaks of an extremely cynical approach and conforms to the worst-case scenario discussed in my book An India That Can Say Yes: A Climate-Responsible Development Agenda for Copenhagen and Beyond, published a year ago. Put simply, India's policymakers are bent on retaining the option to raise the country's emissions under the pretext of development and fighting poverty when their real priority is to support elite consumption-led high GDP growth. Most would doggedly resist any future climate-related restraint even if that means signing a climate deal that is disastrous for the world and hence in the long term for India too. This is tantamount to shooting oneself in the foot.

WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY

After Cancun, the world still has a window of opportunity to work for an effective, ambitious and equitable climate agreement. But it is narrow. It is hard to see how the emerging powers can muster the will to push through such a deal. For all their growing economic and political clout, they do not seriously and effectively resist northern pressure.

Cancun has also created unprecedented rifts and differences within the global environmental movement. Many mainstream green groups such as Greenpeace and Oxfam have welcomed the agreements while more radical ones such as Friends of the Earth have criticised them.

The differences bode ill for the prospect of mounting pressure for an effective and enforceable agreement with legally binding targets for the North. Given the relative poverty of state-level leadership in the North and in key countries of the South and the fact that the North has generally prevailed in the climate talks, preventing catastrophic climate change seems an uphill task, more than it did just two years ago.