Professor Patrick Bond, a leading thinker and analyst on climate change issues, says that he does not expect any progress on the Kyoto Protocol in Doha. Courtesy: Professor Patrick Bond

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Nov 27 2012 (IPS)

There is no political will among rich nations to find funding for developing countries experiencing the brunt of changes in global weather patterns, and the current climate change conference will fail to do so, according to Professor Patrick Bond, a leading thinker and analyst on climate change issues.

“The elites continue to discredit themselves at every opportunity. The only solution is to turn away from these destructive conferences and avoid giving the elites any legitimacy, and instead, to analyse and build the world climate justice movement and its alternatives,” Bond, a political economist and also the director of the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu Natal in South Africa, told IPS.

As the 18th Conference of the Parties (COP18) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) began in Doha, Qatar on Monday Nov. 26, Bond described past COPs as “conferences of polluters”. He believes COP18 will be no different.

“Qatar is an entirely appropriate host country for the next failed climate conference. On grounds of gender, race, class and social equity, environment, civil society voice and democracy, it’s a feudal zone, and the Arab world’s best mass media, Doha-based Al Jazeera, can’t tell the truth at home,” said the professor and author of the book, “Politics of Climate Justice”.

Excerpts of the interview follow:

Q: What is in it for Africa? What is Africa likely to get or to lose from this conference?

A: The most hopeful opportunity is that with the passing of (Ethiopia’s prime minister) Meles Zenawi a few months ago there is a chance for fresh leadership, unencumbered by revelations about Washington’s influence.

Meles was unveiled as purchasable in the WikiLeaks’ U.S. State Department cables from February 2010 … Meles’ pro-Washington stance meant that though he was the loudest official African voice for climate debt and lower northern emissions, it was hard to take the continent seriously.

Sadly, since the quietening of the eloquent Sudanese voice from Copenhagen, Lumumba di Apeng (Sudanese diplomat and chief negotiator for developing countries at COP15), no African leader has made a positive impression.

And though there is a possibility that adaptation funding may flow a bit more to Africa, evidence so far confirms that the West pays elite Africans instead of the people most adversely affected. The Qatar meeting won’t change these crippling problems.

Q: What progress do you anticipate on the Kyoto Protocol in Doha?

A: None at all. The only hope they have is to boost the Green Climate Fund – but already the main polluters like the U.S. have signalled that in spite of Hillary Clinton’s 100 billion dollars a year promise at Copenhagen in 2009, they won’t support it financially, so it is empty and cannot begin to meet either mitigation or adaptation requirements.

Q: From your writings, you hold quite strong views about the Green Climate Fund. Why?

A: Although a vast “climate debt” payment mechanism from the global north to the global south is urgently required, probably on the scale of a trillion dollars a year, we must be critical of the proposed Green Climate Fund from the outset, because its huge potential was destroyed even at the level of design.

This is in part because African elites like the late Zenawi and (South Africa’s former minister of finance) Trevor Manuel played critical co-chairing roles from 2009 through last year.

Because of their pro-market ideology, Manuel especially bought into the insane argument that emissions trading can provide up to half the fund’s revenues, when in reality, these markets are sputtering to their deaths, as witnessed in 2010 at the main U.S. market, in Chicago, and the collapse of the European market over the past 18 months.

That means that there’s insufficient pressure on the north to raise funds through penalising polluters by fining – and then rapidly banning – emissions. It is also likely that the fund’s tiny revenues will be squandered on what we term “false solutions” – a variety of corporate-designed gimmicks to allow them to continue polluting.

What is needed is wide-ranging investment in a post-fossil society, as well as a reparations mechanism to get resources to people suffering from climate change – such as a “basic income grant” for those in affected areas, without interference by the likes of local tyrants – and one leading pilot study for this comes from rural Namibia, funded by German churches, whose results are most encouraging.

Q: How are we doing then on global climate governance?

A: As the (COP17) Durban disaster proved, the idea of global management of the climate catastrophe, given the present adverse balance of forces, is farcical in general…

It is beyond doubt now that any progress at the multilateral level will require two things: first, a further crash of the emissions trading experiment, so as to finally end the fiction that a market run by international bankers can solve a problem of planet-threatening pollution caused by unregulated markets; and second, a banning of delegations from Washington – the U.S. government and Bretton Woods Institutions – since that’s the city most influenced by climate denialists. Hence every move from the U.S. State Department amounts to sabotage.

Can COP18 in Doha deliver a deal that can save Africa from food insecurity as a result of climate change? Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

Q: What of the 2012 climate change negotiations prior to Doha?

A: For every tip-toe step forward taken in Durban – in a context in which during this century, 200 million additional Africans are expected to die early because of extreme droughts and floods – there were reversals by leaps and bounds…

Because of WikiLeaks, we know in great detail that the U.S. State Department is slyly bribing even the occasional courageous delegation, such as the one from the Maldives right after the Copenhagen fiasco. So given the degree of bribery, bullying and corruption from Washington, why would we expect the COP system to suddenly become functional?

Q: What is the future of climate change negotiations?

A: To sum up, the 1987 Montreal Protocol should have immediately been expanded to incorporate greenhouse gases, but instead, because Washington insisted on ineffectual carbon trading a decade later in Kyoto – we have simply not seen an appropriate degree of political will and strategic sophistication, and until this changes, we will not be successful at the multilateral scale.

That means the future of any potentially successful negotiations is actually between activists and the popular support they rally to the cause on the one hand, and governments – and the corporations that often control those governments – on the other.

Even public consciousness has shifted quickly, as a result of extreme weather in the most backward regions of the world, like the northeastern U.S. These are the only bright lights in the world’s efforts to halt climate change, and I feel that if more people know these stories, they would lose their despondency and take action against both their local polluters and crony-corporate governments.

A family walks along the beach in the North Atlantic Autonomous Region, in northeastern Nicaragua. Credit: Germán Miranda/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
DOHA, Nov 26 2012 (IPS)

The upcoming United Nations climate talks may have a renewed sense of urgency with a new World Bank report warning that the planet is on a dangerous path to four degrees Celsius of global warming by 2100.

“Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4ºC Warmer World Must be Avoided”, released on Nov. 19, was prepared for the World Bank by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Climate Analytics.

But the 18th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 18) that begins Nov. 26 in Doha, Qatar has become extremely complex.

There is agreement amongst the 194 nations that are parties to the Convention on the need to set a target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, to keep the increase in global temperatures below two degrees, to avoid catastrophic climate change.

That target is easy enough to understand, but exactly how this can be achieved has been the subject of intense and complex negotiations for many years, said Jennifer Morgan, director of the Climate and Energy Program of the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based NGO.

Last year at COP 17 in Durban it took extra days of negotiations for countries to finally agree to launch a new round of negotiations to create a legally binding international agreement.

That agreement will require carbon emission reductions for all nations by 2015 to meet the two-degree target. It is intended to be ratified and enter into force by 2020.

“No one knows what this new agreement will look like,” Morgan told Tierramérica in a press conference. “Are countries going to show up in Doha with the will to create a solid work plan?”

2015 is only three years off. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which requires some industrialized countries to reduce their emissions, was negotiated in less than three years. However, it took another eight years to be ratified by enough countries to enter into force, and some key nations like the United States backed out of the Protocol.

One of the major issues in Doha will be “ambition”, said Morgan. Ambition refers to how big the emission cuts that nations are prepared to agree to will be.

Climate science clearly shows that to stay below two degrees of warming, global greenhouse gas emissions must begin to decline by 2020.

To do this, industrialized nations must trim their emissions output by 25 to 40 percent below their 1990 emission levels.

The United States has pledged to make a three percent reduction compared to 1990 levels. The United Kingdom is aiming for a 34 percent reduction and has already reached 18 percent.

“We hope the U.S. will bring a new strategy, including greater ambition, to Doha,” said Morgan.

Most countries’ current reduction pledges are nowhere near what is needed, said Bill Hare, director of Climate Analytics, a non-profit climate science advisory group based in Berlin.

Countries have to find ways to trim another 9 to 11 billion tons of CO2 by 2020 or forget two degrees Celsius, Hare told Tierramérica.

This “emissions gap” between the reductions pledged and those needed to keep the climate under control is growing larger, based on new data to be released this week by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and Hare’s group.

“The gap keeps getting bigger… making it ever more difficult and costly to stay below two degrees,” said Hare.

Deforestation is the second largest source of climate-heating carbon emissions after fossil fuels.

To provide a financial incentive for developing countries to reduce deforestation, a controversial programme called REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) is also being negotiated at COP 18.

Forests are far more valuable than places to store carbon, according to the first comprehensive scientific assessment of REDD+ and potential impacts on biodiversity and local peoples’ livelihoods.

Conserving biodiversity and sustaining livelihoods are essential if REDD+ is going to work, says the new study, “Understanding Relationships Between Biodiversity, Carbon, Forests and People: The Key to Achieving REDD+ Objectives. A Global Assessment Report”.

Coordinated by the world’s largest network of forest scientists, the International Union of Forest Research Organisations (IUFRO), the report will be formally presented during the meeting in Doha.

“The world’s rapidly dwindling forests are not just carbon warehouses,” John Parrotta, report co-author and scientist with the United States Forest Service, told Tierramérica. “Forests provide a wide range of environmental goods and services that people need.”

Those goods and services include cleaning water, preventing flooding, and providing food and habitat for humans and many other creatures like bees that perform valuable services like pollination.

Deforestation currently gobbles up an area the size of Greece (13 million hectares) every year, and is driven mostly by conversion to agriculture and by the wood products industries. REDD+ is an attempt to reverse this by creating a financial value for the carbon stored in forests.

Trees take heat-trapping carbon out of the atmosphere as they grow and store it for as long as the trees live. Instead of cutting down trees and selling the wood, the carbon trapped in the living trees can be sold as “carbon credits” on an open market.

A steel, cement, or coal-fired power company in the United States or a European country can then buy those credits instead of reducing its carbon emissions. The current price is around 10 dollars per ton, but this fluctuates.

Like any market, the carbon market demands verification of how much carbon is in a forest and how much carbon will remain there over 40, 60 or 80 years. This is both very technical and very expensive to do.

Purchasers of carbon credits also want contractual agreements with forest owners to guarantee the carbon stays in the forest, which may prevent local people from using the forest to grow food, fix a roof or even hunt for generations.

While REDD+ could protect forests and be an annual revenue source for local people, doing it right is very complex and there is much work left to do, said Parrotta. “It is hard to see how there will be much progress at Doha.”

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

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