The climate cop out

This is how the war against climate change has progressed thus far: it began in 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, when an international treaty framed by the United Nations – the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change – was introduced to the world in an effort to combat dangerous climate change resulting from greenhouse gas emissions.
The treaty was put into force in 1994, with 192 parties ratifying its objectives of creating a set of shared yet differentiated responsibilities for developed and developing countries. The former would drive the climate change war by setting positive examples of emissions reductions, and would provide finance and technology to developing countries to enable them to mimic these demonstrated achievements; and the latter would ensure utilisation of funds and technology to embark on effective programmes of poverty eradication and economic and social development.
A few years later, in 1997, under the auspices of the Kyoto Protocol, the first legally binding targets for developed nations were introduced, including monitoring and verification mechanisms and an obligation to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases to 5.2 percent below 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012. A total of 189 countries signed on except the US, which in effect meant that Kyoto was a failure that would resonate significantly till COP 15 in Copenhagen in 2009. Between Kyoto and COP-15 came the Bali Action Plan in 2007, which aimed to bring the US to the climate change negotiating table and set new targets for existing ‘Kyoto protocol countries’ to reduce emissions and take structural and strategic mitigation and adaptation measures, devise schemes for technology transfer to developing countries and provide the funding that would realise the nationally appropriate mitigation actions expected of developing countries.
COP-15 was a cop out, with the US manipulating the media and strong-arming the conference to ensure an outcome

that would promote the status quo – the climate change debate continuing along informal lines with a zero accountability obligation for the US. A weak agreement was thus birthed at COP-15, with no real future for an effective global climate change agreement in sight. Then, in 2011, at the UN Climate Conference in Durban a new climate treaty was pledged for 2015, one that would come into legal force in 2020 and would, in addition to the developed western nations, also secure commitments from India, China and Brazil to reduce emissions.
And that’s the buzz now, as we speed through the remaining three months of 2015 and head into COP-21 in December, where more than 190 countries will meet to make history, by signing a blue print for a safer, sustainable and greener planet for generations to come. And Paris, in December, is also precisely where the waters of the climate change debate will be ever murkier to navigate through. Here are a few reasons why: the developed countries, in particular the US and Canada and much of Western Europe and Russia simply cannot imagine a world where there will be checks and balances on their individual technological and industrial goals.
If the past three decades provide anything, it is foremost a damning testimony of the greed of the developed world. For in these three decades these most advanced nations have continued to consume ever escalating amounts of energy and food and water and natural resources, with a complementary increase in greenhouse emissions, deforestation, fresh and sea water pollution, soil degradation and declining biodiversity. And the brunt of the negative impact of this permanent damage has been felt primarily in the developing world.
So while climatespeak now makes continuous references to a ‘green tomorrow’, the giants of modern industry work to ensure that, while ‘green’ will always mean more efficiency with less damage and more innovations in industry and maybe even more equity in resource consumption, it must never mean less. And so the climate change debate is set to follow a particular course: developed nations will push the agenda for the world to utilise cleaner energy and devise sustainable, environmentally friendly industrial technology and obtain more carbon credits, for each acre of rainforest destroyed or every ton of carbon dioxide pumped out by North American and European factories.
In the meanwhile the profit-maximising global ‘big industry’ will simultaneously, quietly and smugly, continue to whet its insatiable appetite for ever increasing quantities of fossil fuels – shale oil in the US and the mining of tar sands in Canada being obvious examples – not to mention the increased consumption of water and wood and land and food, to service the highly energy dependent post-industrial lifestyles of its consumers.
Paradoxically, another hurdle towards a global, legally binding agreement for climate change will come from the developing world, convinced as it is that the only desirable future is one carefully and precisely benchmarked to the progress and the current living standards of, the industrialised west. For countries such as India and China and even Pakistan, who do not have a historical charge sheet against them for polluting the earth’s ecosystem, there will be little incentive to halt development on the directions of, on this count, the guiltier members of the developed world. On the contrary these and other developing countries will demand more tangible commitments from the west – in the form of funding and technology transfer and emission reduction pledges – before they make their own; and they will only make commitments that pose zero risk of compromise in their development goals.
There is hope yet that Paris may result in a tangible step forward, with the US also assuming responsibility for its role in climate change, like the other members of the Kyoto protocol. But the chances are slimmer for there being real debate or focus on reducing resource consumption, or exploring possibilities of limiting, if not altogether halting, the extraction of fossil fuels, or considering the enforcement of lifestyle changes in wealthier nations that may mean the consumption of less meat and wheat and industrial comforts per person.
For Pakistan, this week’s conference, a local prelude to COP-21 titled ‘Pakistan sey Paris – On the road to 2015 Paris Conference’ will give government representatives, international and national NGOs and other members of civil society a chance to deliberate on what they intend to take to, and get back from, Paris. Pakistan is one of the countries that are most vulnerable to dangerous climate change: the bulk of its population lives in locales that are constantly under threat from droughts and flooding and in each year in the last decade, the effects of global warming have caused immeasurable financial, development and infrastructural losses.
We need a strategy to safeguard against the roll-back of our development endeavours from the effects of climate change and we need to negotiate a mechanism of support from the west that respects our own requirements for economic and industrial development. What our heads of state, however, also need to guard against is conceiving a strategy and mechanism that eventually becomes mired in red tape and corruption, or is tantamount only to the kind of posturing that ensures that any hope of salvaging a truly sustainable, equitable and energy efficient future for Pakistan is stillborn.
The writer is a freelance columnist.
Email: kmushirhotmail.com
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Editor’s note: Islamabad diary is on leave.