Headlines

ENVIRONMENT: Kyoto Pact Back on Agenda

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Nov 1 2002 (IPS) - Ten days of wrangling between rich and poor countries over who should take on the burden of controlling climate change ended Friday with one tangible result: the retention of the centrality of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which binds industrialised countries to curbing greenhouse gases.

Ten days of wrangling between rich and poor countries over who should take on the burden of controlling climate change ended Friday with one tangible result: the retention of the centrality of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which binds industrialised countries to curbing greenhouse gases.

At one point, it looked as if the Kyoto Protocol would not even find mention in the otherwise unremarkable ‘Delhi Declaration’ adopted by delegates from 185 countries at the end of the eighth Conference of the Parties (COP-8) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Control (UNFCCC).

But a tough stance taken by the European Union, the Group of 77 developing countries and China ensured that the resolution said: ”Parties that have ratified the Kyoto Protocol strongly urge parties that have not already done so to ratify the Kyoto Protocol in a timely manner.”

On the other hand, EU protests against linking climate change with sustainable development – some activists say developing nations face more basic and urgent problems that global warming – was given short shrift.

The declaration calls for ”building on the outcomes” of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in September.

Right at the outset, U.S. officials declared that the country would never ratify the protocol and seemed to expend their energies on slowing down the process in whatever way it could.

”If COP-8 failed to make progress on climate change it was because the usual suspects in the fossil fuel lobby, particularly the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, worked to prevent any forward movement, ” said Steven Sawyer, international campaigner for Greenpeace International.

Sawyer said the fossil fuel lobby succeeded in stalling serious discussion on the recently released third assessment report of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which called for urgent action and for starting a process to look beyond the Kyoto period that ends in 2012.

The declaration’s preamble cursorily refers to the IPCC, a scientific body mandated to report to the U.N. on climate change, saying mildly that its findings should be considered in the negotiations process.

According to Kate Hampton, spokeswoman for Friends of the Earth International, the United States and Saudi Arabia, by manipulating disagreements, succeeded in driving a wedge between the industrialised countries and the developing countries.

”This has been good for the United States,” Mexican Environment Minister Andre Avila said of the Delhi Declaration, which the charitable referred to as ‘weak’ and others as a ‘cut and paste’ job from earlier meetings.

About the only significant attempt to pin responsibility on the industrialised countries was in the issue of long-term emission cuts.

The Delhi Declaration calls for action to fulfill the objective of the UNFCCC, but does not mention whether more countries, including developing ones, might eventually need to take action.

”Once again, the nations of the world have failed to take the steps needed to stop climate catastrophe. Millions of people around the world will pay for their delay, as emissions continue to rise,” said Hampton.

Hampton lamented the lack of preparation by governments for COP-8, while others activists said they were suffering from “conference fatigue” after the WSSD six weeks ago.

But among the lobbies that came well-prepared was Saudi Arabia and that, according to Sawyer, was owing to the fact that it could rely on the best brains made available to it by U.S. oil interests.

Sawyer said although much was being made on the progress of ‘adaptation’ at COP-8, the fact was that a ”lot of scientific and analytical work for serious adaptation programmes needs to be done first”.

All that had been thwarted, he said, ”by eternal wrangling over relatively small sums of money”.

”Contentious funding issues have been only partially resolved or deferred, with arguments centreing on the tone of documents and deferral dates rather than substance,” said Hampton.

Another claimed area of progress at the conference was the completion of all conditions for the Clean Development Mechanism, a mechanism that lets developed countries invest in clean technologies in the developing world and earn credits without actually cutting greenhouse gas emissions at home.

”We can start next year independent of whether or not the Kyoto Protocol comes into force,” said German Environment Minister Jurgen Trittin.

But even here, negotiations on rules for the use of ”carbon sinks” have been deferred after serious objections on the treatment of forestry and land use by several countries, including India.

Trittin counted as progress the fact that reporting rules for industrialised and developing countries could be adopted in the Delhi Declaration and an international programme for public education and awareness agreed upon.

He said there were strong indications that the crucial issue of Russia’s ratification of the Kyoto Protocol and getting it past the critical threshold of accession by countries producing 55 percent of total emissions in 1990 was very strong at COP 8.

Some Russian officials however said procedural delays could take another year.

”The fact is that if Russia does not ratify, then it can’t sell emission rights to other countries and cant get any money,” Trittin said.

But the biggest damper preventing the Kyoto Protocol from coming into force as scheduled next year is the United States. Although it is the world’s biggest polluter by far, it refuses to ratify it the protocol fear that it would undercut economic growth.

”Our position is that the Kyoto Protocol is not fair, it is not affordable and it is not effective,” said Paula Dobriansky, U.S. undersecretary of state for global affairs.

Developing countries have been spared from cutting emissions till 2012 and are balking at even discussing the subject as the United States and other developed countries are demanding.

On Wednesday, Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee said that climate change mitigation would only ”bring additional strain to the already fragile economies of the developing countries and will affect our efforts to achieve higher growth rates to eradicate poverty speedily”. But the real question that scientific studies and NGOs sought to drive home at COP-8 was whether the whole world, developed and developing, could afford not to take drastic measures to curb climate change, the effects of which were being felt in terms of changed seasonal cycles, freak floods and droughts.

A United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) study distributed at the conference said that global warming killed more than 9,000 people this year and caused damage worth 70 billion U.S. dollars.