“Predictions are that the emission reduction pledges under the Agreement would lead to rise in temperatures beyond 3 degrees celsius, which would be catastrophic for the world,” Meena Raman told IPS. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS.

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 19 2016 (IPS)

Over 150 countries are expected to sign the Paris climate change agreement on April 22 but the historic treaty will not come into force until it has been ratified by 55 countries.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who has hailed the agreement as “a landmark of international cooperation on one of the world’s most complex issues”, is hoping for fast-paced ratifications – perhaps before the end of the year so that it will also be considered as one of his lasting political legacies before he steps down in December.

And he may not be far off the mark.

“Early ratification and entry into force will send a strong signal to Governments, businesses and communities that it is time to fast-track climate action,” Ban said last week.

The real challenge lies ahead, he declared, describing it in a single word:  “Implementation.”

Dr Palitha Kohona, a former Chief of the UN Treaty Section, told IPS although signatories are important, the more significant aspect of any international treaty is ratification – some of them long drawn out because that action has to be taken by domestic legislatures.

The Paris Agreement (PA), he pointed out, will enter into force when 55 countries that produce at least 55 percent of the world’s Greenhouse Gas (GHGs) — “ratify, accede, approve or accept it.”

Signatures alone, even by a large majority, will not bring it in to force, he added. He said there are other treaties with similarly complex entry-in-to force provisions.

The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), he noted, has still not entered in to force despite having been signed by over one hundred countries on the first day it was opened for signature at a glittering ceremony at the UN headquarters over 20 years ago.

President Clinton was the first to affix his signature on behalf of the US, he said. That treaty has been ratified by 157 countries, but the holdouts include the US, China, Egypt, India, Iran, Israel, North Korea and Pakistan.

“The critical element to entry in to force (of the Paris agreement) will be the key GHG producers. The US, China, Brazil, Russia and the European Union (EU) account for over 75 percent of the world’s GHG emissions and they could provide the main impetus for bringing the agreement in to force”, said Dr Kohona.

Asked if it is realistic to expect the treaty to come into force early, Meena Raman, Legal advisor of the Malaysia-based Third World Network, told IPS: “Well, if the United States and China both ratify early or even this year, then about 40 percent of the global emissions would have been covered but the remaining countries would have to account for the balance of the 15 percent of the emissions and at least 55 countries must have ratified the agreement.”

So it is not completely unrealistic for the early ratification of the agreement before 2020, said Raman, who was been monitoring all of the climate change negotiations as a member of civil society.

However, what is more important to consider, she argued, is the effect of the early ratification and entry into force of the agreement.

The contributions that Parties will make (referred to as ‘nationally determined contributions’) – as to how they would contribute to emission reductions and adaptation actions will only be effective from 2020 onwards, as that is what countries have stated they will do in their intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs), prior to Paris.

So, even if the PA comes into effect say in 2017 or 2018, the actual effect of actions by Parties will begin to materialise from 2020 to 2025/2030 onwards only under the agreement, she noted.

It is well known that the aggregate emissions reductions from the existing INDCs that have been communicated by Parties thus far which will translate to their contributions under the Agreement is grossly inadequate to keep temperature rise to well below 2 degree celsius, let alone 1.5 degrees, she said.

“Predictions are that the emission reduction pledges under the Agreement would lead to rise in temperatures beyond 3 degrees celsius, which would be catastrophic for the world.”

So, while the early entry into force of the PA may send some positive signals, the real issue is whether governments, especially in the developed world step up with their emission cuts even more ambitiously now and provide the necessary financial and technology transfer resources to developing countries to also act with urgency in the pre-2020 time frame – and not wait for actions after 2020, as they had agreed under the various decisions of the UNFCCC (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) and the Kyoto Protocol.

Eliza Northrop, an Associate in the International Climate Initiative at the Washington-based World Resources Institute, told IPS the Paris Agreement, with the required ratifications,  could enter into force in 2017 or even earlier.

It certainly will happen faster than previous comparable agreements, such as the Kyoto Protocol, she pointed out.

“Not only is there greater political momentum behind the Paris Agreement but the conditions for entry into force are different to that of the Kyoto Protocol”.

Although the Kyoto Protocol followed a similar “55 Parties/55 percent of emissions” approach to the Paris Agreement – in the case of the Kyoto Protocol, the “55 percent of emissions” threshold was only based on the carbon dioxide emissions from developed country Parties.

By contrast, she said, the Paris Agreement takes into account all greenhouse gas emissions from all countries.

“Entry into force will require the support of a broad constituency of countries and broad support for climate action from the largest emitters to the most vulnerable island nations,” Northrop added.

Dr Kohona told IPS the policy of the US would be seminal.

While its past performance in this area of global law making has not been encouraging, and climate sceptics exert a disproportionate amount of influence on US policy making, it is to be hoped that the threat to the very existence of the human race that climate change poses will influence its decision making.

“Any dilution of the leadership provided so far by the US could provide the excuse for others to to lose their enthusiasm”.

The commitment of the administration of President Barack Obama to address the threat of climate change forcefully must remain unabated if the world is to deal with this problem effectively, he declared.

Meanwhile, the provisions of the agreement include reaffirming the goal of limiting global temperature increase well below 2 degrees celsius, while urging efforts to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees.

At the same time, the Paris Agreement calls for establishing binding commitments by all parties to make “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs), and to pursue domestic measures aimed at achieving them; commits all countries to report regularly on their emissions and “progress made in implementing and achieving” their NDCs, and to undergo international review and submit new NDCs every five years, with the clear expectation that they will “represent a progression” beyond previous ones.

Additionally, the agreement reaffirms the binding obligations of developed countries under the UNFCCC (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) to support the efforts of developing countries, while for the first time encouraging voluntary contributions by developing countries too, and extends the current goal of mobilizing $100 billion a year in support by 2020 through 2025, with a new, higher goal to be set for the period after 2025.

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

Bhumika Muchhala of Third World Network. Credit: UN Photo/Paulo Filgueiras

By Bhumika Muchhala
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 7 2015 (IPS)

At about a quarter to seven on the evening of Sunday, Aug. 2, the member states of the United Nations adopted the post-2015 development agenda outcome document, titled “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda.”

As governments endorsed the 29-page product resulting from almost two years of transparent and relatively democratic negotiations, the final 48 hours had witnessed a very different story, that of a sharp turn towards closed-door consultations and last-minute bargaining chips.What transpired requires a moment to reflect on the reality of vested interests and deeply unequal power between negotiating governments.

The 2030 Agenda is arguably the most ambitious and expansive development agenda that has ever been set in motion. It will be in effect for 15 years (2015-2030) and is to be implemented on all levels ranging from the global and multilateral level (such as the World Bank), regional (such as regional commissions and funds) and national (both government level and development agencies).

The main meat of the 2030 agenda is the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), comprised of 17 goals and 169 targets covering economic, social and environmental issues ranging from inequality, poverty, climate change, infrastructure, energy, industrialisation, consumption and production, health, education, ecosystem, biodiversity and oceans.

These SDGs will be the first global development paradigm to be marked by universality, meaning that all countries are to take action toward sustainable development, including the rich and powerful. This distinguishes the SDGs from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of 2000-2015, which was based on an explicitly donor-recipient model of aid from the rich countries to the poor.

For all 193 governments of the U.N. to come to an agreement on this agenda was a breathtaking feat of conflict and compromise. However, over the first weekend of August, the otherwise open and recorded negotiations went into radio-silence in the back-rooms as the United States reportedly issued an ultimatum without which they refused to adopt the document.

The U.S. wanted to replace the word “ensure” with the word “promote” in two goals that talked about ensuring that the profits and patents reaped from the world’s natural biodiversity are shared fairly with the countries and communities from which they are extracted. The legal agreement on biodiversity clearly states the word “ensure.” By injecting the much weaker word “promote,” the U.S. tried to dilute hard-won legal language to something that is nebulous at best and unenforceable at worst.

This amendment essentially lets rich and powerful countries, whose corporations and research institutions extract the vast majority of biodiversity resources of the world, off the hook from their legal commitments to equitably share benefits and rewards that come from these resources. Developing countries were infuriated because most of this extraction happens in their countries, specifically, from the seeds, plants, forests and land on which most indigenous peoples across the world live in.

The negotiating group of 134 developing countries had repeatedly stated that the global goals were not to be re-opened for negotiation at the last minute, that they were sacrosanct. The fact that this firm position was flagrantly violated as a last-minute take-it-or-leave-it deal filled the air of the U.N. conference room with a palpable distrust and tension. People rushed in and out of conference rooms, furiously whispering in each other’s ears while working day and night to reach a consensus, no matter what.

Similarly, the progressive language on debt was also undermined, reportedly by the European Union this time. Up until the morning of Sunday, Aug. 1, the document said: “We recognize the need to assist developing countries … through debt financing, debt relief, debt restructuring and sound debt management, as appropriate.” This language recognised the sound development economics arguments called for by numerous economists and developing countries, on the urgent need to address external debt if any development goals are to be achieved.

By late afternoon, this was inserted: “Maintaining sustainable debt levels is the responsibility of the borrowing countries…”  Plucked out of the outcome document of the Financing for Development conference in Addis Ababa last month, this sentence harmfully faults borrowing countries for their debt burdens without due attention on the complex role of lenders and creditors, a point that has been repeatedly emphasised in the Greek case.

It’s a stark regression from the notion of co-responsibility between lenders and borrowers in previous U.N. documents from Monterrey in 2002 and Doha in 2008.

The fear of such retrogression in language from the Addis Ababa document drove developing countries to keep insisting until the last hour that it not be annexed to the 2030 Agenda as developed countries called for. In the end, the Addis Ababa text was not annexed. But the compromise was this sort of selective importation of language. Other attempts were also proposed by developed countries in the final hours but were steadfastly fought back, such as removing reference to “policy space,” arguably the most vital demand of developing countries.

Although policy space is mentioned twice in the 2030 agenda and once in the SDGs, it is qualified with language from the Addis Ababa text in one of these three mentions. This language is: “…while remaining consistent with relevant international rules and commitments.” This negates the very point of policy space, which is to address the very “international rules and commitments” that constrain the ability of a state to formulate and carry out development-oriented policies and pathways.

On the other side of the North-South firewall, African and Arab countries called for the removal of a critical paragraph recognising human rights as a principal aim of sustainable development and a commitment to non-discrimination for all. While the paragraph was saved from this late Friday night intervention, the essential term “discrimination” was scrapped and the word “fulfill” was demoted to “promote.”

Issues such as ethnicity, migration status, culture, economic situation or age as a protected status were also scrapped although “race, colour, sex, language, religion, political opinion, national or social origin, property, birth, disability or other status” remain.

African and Arab diplomats argued against the recognition of LGBT rights and objected to the inclusion of “all social and economic groups,” while many Latin American countries, the European Union and the U.S. firmly opposed the offense against human and civil rights.

It is now more than two decades since the U.N. reaffirmed the interdependence of human rights and development at the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights and more than 20 years since the U.N. first recognised sexual orientation and gender identity as prohibited grounds of discrimination.

The 11^th hour turn from openness to opacity reflects a crisis of multilateralism in the world’s primary locus of multilateralism, the U.N. After all, the U.N. is supposed to be the most democratic and universal institution that exists to date, one in which every nation has a vote, unlike the rich country-dominated IMF or World Bank.

The private bilateral consultations over the weekend of Aug. 1-2 were, according to many independent observers, a manufactured crisis that opened the door to text that endangers global development and law.

The problem is that backroom dealings and pressure campaigns have ominous implications for the legitimacy and fairness of international negotiations, not to mention the political will of governments to take the sustainable development goals seriously.

The new global development agenda has powerful potential to make an ambitious and universal dent of urgently needed progress in our economies, societies and environments.  At the same time, process is also important. What transpired this first weekend of August requires a moment to reflect on the reality of vested interests and deeply unequal power between negotiating governments.

(Note: As of Aug. 6, 3:00 p.m., the final outcome document of the post-2015 development agenda has not yet been officially published by the U.N. Secretariat. The last draft available is the Aug.1  draft without the changes noted above.  There is some speculation and concern as to why there is a delay of four days, which is only compounding the lack of transparency in the final hours of negotiation.)

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Macharia Kamau, Permanent Representative of the Republic of Kenya to the U.N., addresses a press conference on the agreement achieved on 2 August by Member States on the outcome document of the United Nations Summit to adopt the post-2015 development agenda. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 3 2015 (IPS)

After more than two years of intense negotiations, the U.N.’s 193 member states have unanimously agreed on a new Sustainable Development Agenda (SDA) with 17 goals — including the elimination of extreme poverty and hunger — to be reached by 2030.

At a press briefing Monday, Ambassador Macharia Kamau of Kenya, one of the co-facilitators of the intergovernmental consultative process, told reporters the implementation of the agenda could cost a staggering 3.5 trillion to 5.0 trillion dollars per year.“Women and girls everywhere have much to gain from the SDGs. But to make this a reality, we have to keep pressure on governments to follow through on their commitments." -- Shannon Kowalski

This looks like “an astronomical figure”, he said, compared with the hundreds of billions of dollars – not trillions – the United Nations has been traditionally seeking for development aid.

“It is ambitious, but not unattainable,” he said, and could come mostly from domestic resources, both public and private.

“All countries have to rise to the occasion,” he said, adding that it was imperative for the business sector to get on board.

Still, the U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs Wu Hongbo of China struck a more cautious note when he told reporters “it will be very difficult to give specific figures.”

But all 193 member states, he said, are expected to mobilise domestic sources to help attain the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015

The SDGs are a successor to the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which were approved by heads of state in 2000, and will end in December this year.

The new goals, which will be part of the U.N.’s post-2015 development agenda and to be approved at a summit meeting of world leaders Sep. 25-27, cover a wide range of political and socio-economic issues, including poverty, hunger, gender equality, industrialisation, sustainable development, full employment, human rights, quality education, climate change and sustainable energy for all.

Jens Martens, director of the Bonn-based Global Policy Forum, who has been closely monitoring the negotiations, told IPS the new Sustainable Development Agenda is a compromise and the result of a painful consensus building process.

“The new Agenda is unique, as it is universal and contains goals and responsibilities for all countries in the world, including the rich and powerful,” he noted.

The Agenda addresses the raising inequalities within and among countries and the enormous disparities of opportunities, wealth and power, Martens pointed out.

Some of the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are highly ambitious, like the first goal to end poverty in all its forms everywhere.

However, the Agenda is far less ambitious when it comes to the means of implementation, he warned.

“The implementation of the SDGs will require fundamental changes in fiscal policy, regulation and global governance. But what we find in the new Agenda is vague and by far not sufficient to trigger the proclaimed transformational change. But goals without sufficient means are meaningless,” he declared.

Bhumika Muchhala, senior policy analyst, finance and development at the Third World Network, told IPS the SDGs are indeed significantly more ambitious than the MDGs, but that much of this money is going to come from two key sources.

One, private money, through the “multi-stakeholder partnerships” that the U.N. has enshrined in the SDG Goal 17 as well as through various other processes, such as the Sustainable Energy for All initiative or the Global Financing Facility.

And second, from domestic money straight from developing country coffers, as no new international money is being committed.

She said the glaring absence of any intergovernmental process or model of governance over these proliferating multi-stakeholder partnerships renders them void of accountability and transparency, much less rigorous due diligence practices such as ex-ante and independent assessments, monitoring and oversight and third-party evaluation processes.

Such provisions and principles, she noted, are even integrated into the World Bank Group’s architecture, where the Ombudsman and even the IEO (Independent Evaluation Office) in the IMF serve as monitoring agencies.

For example, it has been demonstrated that the decision-making taking place in a fund like the Global Financing Facility will be done behind closed doors, by a small group of elite financial investors and private sector actors who contribute to the Facility, she added.

Shannon Kowalski, Director of Advocacy and Policy, International Women’s Health Coalition, told IPS the SDGs signal a major step forward, especially for women and girls.

With this new framework there is potential to really change the game and advance gender equality—which has been recognised as absolutely essential to sustainable development, she added.

“Women and girls everywhere have much to gain from the SDGs. But to make this a reality, we have to keep pressure on governments to follow through on their commitments. In the end, the promise of this historic development agenda is really up to us,” Kowalski declared.

Ian Koski, a spokesperson for the ONE Campaign, said the new global goals are a major landmark in the effort to end extreme poverty.

They lay out a global contract for a world where nobody lives in hunger or dies of preventable diseases, and while their formal adoption in September will rightly be cause for celebration, goals alone will not end poverty, he said.

It’s going to take a significant amount of hard work to turn these aspirations into reality. It’s going to take national blueprints for delivery that will improve the lives of the poorest people and the poorest countries, he cautioned.

“The monitoring of the goals will need a sharp focus on accountability, backed by investments in data collection and use so that citizens have the information they need to ensure that leaders keep their promises,” Koski declared.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the new development agenda “encompasses a universal, transformative and integrated agenda that heralds an historic turning point for our world.”

“This is the People’s Agenda, a plan of action for ending poverty in all its dimensions, irreversibly, everywhere, and leaving no one behind. It seeks to ensure peace and prosperity, and forge partnerships with people and planet at the core.”

He said the integrated, interlinked and indivisible 17 Sustainable Development Goals are the people’s goals and demonstrate the scale, universality and ambition of this new Agenda.

Ban said the September Summit, where the new agenda will be adopted, “will chart a new era of Sustainable Development in which poverty will be eradicated, prosperity shared and the core drivers of climate change tackled.”

Deon Nel, international acting executive director for conservation at World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) said: “We congratulate negotiators on their bold action. This is an essential move toward realizing our dream of shaping a world where people, planet and prosperity come together.”

He said SDGs are universal goals that will commit all countries to take action both within their own borders and in support of wider international efforts.

Individual national commitments must add up to a worldwide result that helps all people and ensures a healthy environment.

He said the new development plan represents significant improvement from the U.N.’s MDGs as it recognises the interlinkages between sustainability of ecosystem services, poverty eradication, economic development and human well-being.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

Bhumika Muchhala of Third World Network. Credit: UN Photo/Paulo Filgueiras

By Bhumika Muchhala
ADDIS ABABA, Jul 23 2015 (IPS)

The United Nations is the only universal forum that connects systemic issues to the global partnership for development. The latter recognises North-South cooperation based on historical responsibility and varying levels of development and capacity among member states of the U.N.

And there is a vital acknowledgement of the global rules and drivers that determine national policy space for development.While prospects are uncertain for now, what is increasingly clear is the stark fact that the geopolitical offensive in the U.N. has not abated. If anything, it has become even more pronounced.

With regard to such systemic reforms, the Addis Ababa outcome on Financing for Development (FfD) explicitly ignores a landmark initiative in the U.N. itself to establish an international statutory legal framework for debt restructuring.

Instead, it reaffirms the dominance of creditor-led mechanisms, such as the Paris Club, whose inequitable governance was criticised in the Doha Declaration of 2008.

The Addis outcome also welcomes existing OECD and IMF initiatives which do not address the scale of debt problems afflicting many developing countries today, such as Jamaica, which according to its finance minister’s intervention in Addis Ababa, won’t be able to finance its SDGs until its external debt can achieve sustainability in 2025.

Clearly, servicing creditors has to precede development goals. Reversing this order by incorporating national development financing needs into debt sustainability analyses was neglected by most member states in the FFD negotiations.

In spite of the global recognition that capital controls are crucial to developing countries ability to protect themselves from financial crises, the outcome document demotes the use of “capital flow management measures” as a last resort “after necessary macroeconomic policy adjustment.”

This is a regression from the 2002 Monterrey Consensus, which recognised that “Measures that mitigate the impact of excessive volatility of short-term capital flows are important and must be considered.” Financial regulations, particularly on derivatives trading, goes unheeded.

Similarly, the Addis outcome makes no call for special drawing rights (SDR) allocations. Again, this is a step back from Monterrey, which addressed SDR allocations in two clauses. SDR allocations, if carried out on the basis of need, could serve as a development finance tool by boosting developing countries foreign exchange reserves without creating additional dependency on primary reserve currencies.

Unlike most global economic arenas, FfD has the mandate to address international monetary system reform in a development-oriented manner. The Addis outcome, again, missed this chance entirely.

Despite these critical retrogressions, there are two beacons of light in the Addis outcome: the establishment of a Technology Facilitation Mechanism (TFM) in the UN that supports SDG achievement, and an institutionalized FFD follow-up mechanism that will involve up to five days of review every year to generate “agreed conclusions and recommendations.”

However, this follow-up forum is to be shared with the review of MOI for the post-2015 development agenda, going against developing countries call for the FFD follow-up to be distinct and independent from that for the post-2015 development agenda in order to maintain focus on the specificities of the FFD agenda.

While the TFM has positive potential, especially if it address intellectual property rights and endogenous technological development in developing countries and does not become a platform to facilitate the ‘green economy’ through the , it is at the same time not tantamount to the financing items that comprise the development agenda. As such, the TFM helps obscure the paucity of political ambition on the FFD agenda.

A crisis of multilateralism

Perhaps the most sordid mark of a process that occurred in bad faith is the fact that negotiations never transpired in Addis Ababa. There was no official plenary, no proposals articulated and no document projected onto a screen to amend.

Instead, what took place over four days in Addis Ababa was a behind-the-scenes pressure campaign exerted by the most powerful countries onto most developing countries. One developing country delegate revealed that the pressure included bullying and blackmailing to silence many developing countries who can’t afford to be politically defiant.

Another delegate disclosed that he had never before experienced such an absence of transparency within the U.N. Some observers commented that what transpired in Addis Ababa was akin to a ‘Green Room’ style of discussions, where private talks are held in small groups without any gesture of openness or transparency.

A central strategy of developed countries was the distortion of developing country narratives and the creation of new narratives to undermine the longstanding arguments of developing countries. Throughout the FFD negotiations in New York, the European Union (EU) created a narrative of ‘the world has changed.’

They argued that developing countries’ emphasis on international public finance as the primary source for financial resources and developing countries’ red line on the Rio principle of CBDR does not reflect a world that has changed since Monterrey in 2002.

Much of the FfD text is still premised on an outdated North-South construct, the EU said, which does not reflect the complexity of today’s world. Germany reinforced the EU’s position, adding that the G77’s positions do not consider the reality that emerging economies are now capable of taking on some of the financing burdens for development.

In response to this challenge laid on middle-income countries, India provided a succinct response. India pointed out that the 30 richest countries of the world account for only 17 percent of the global population, but over 60 percent of global GDP, more than 50% of global electricity consumption and nearly 40 percent of global CO2 emissions.

The UN report on “Inequality Matters – World Social Situation 2013,” said that in 2010, high-income countries generated 55 percent of global income, while low-income countries created just above 1 percent of global income even though they contained 72 percent of the global population. India clarified that despite the relatively faster rates of growth in developing countries, international inequality has not fallen.

The above UN report on inequality shows that that excluding one large developing country (e.g. China), the Gini coefficient of international inequality was higher in 2010 than as compared to 1980. India concluded that these figures attest to the fact of the North-South gap, saying that member states will be doing themselves a disservice if reality is misrepresented.

Implications for post-2015 and climate change

The ways in which key words such as “transformative,” “ambitious,” “rule of law” and “enabling environment” were used, or misused, by developed country negotiators in the FFD negotiations have made their developing country counterparts wary of the gap between actual meaning and rhetorical application.

The phrase ‘enabling environment’ is used by developing countries to refer to an enabling environment for development. This involves development-oriented reforms in the international financial and trade architecture, such as addressing unfair agricultural subsidies in developed countries or pro-cyclical macroeconomic conditions attached to financial loans.

However, developed countries also use the phrase ‘enabling environment’ with equivalent vigor. Except that they are referring to an enabling environment for private investment, such as business-friendly taxes and labour market deregulation.

The experience of the FfD negotiations suggests that when these terms are tossed about in the post-2015 and COP 21 negotiations, they will be associated with limiting the policy space of developing countries. For the most part, this limitation is linked to facilitating private sector activity through multi-stakeholder or public-private partnerships that involve shared financing between multiple entities while most decision-making remains in the seat of the private sector.

Meanwhile, an implicit ebbing, if not a reneging, takes place on the public and international financing obligations of developing countries. Consequently, financing and decision-making shifts to institutions where developing countries have to compete with representatives of the private sector and private foundations for voice and representation.

As the last two weeks of post-2015 development agenda negotiations conclude in New York, the repercussions of the FFD experience remain to be witnessed. Will developing countries unite with renewed strength and determination to bring multilateralism back? Or will the retrogression in commitments and actions induced by Addis Ababa drag the post-2015 outcome down to its lowly ambition?

While prospects are uncertain for now, what is increasingly clear is the stark fact that the geopolitical offensive in the U.N. has not abated. If anything, it has become even more pronounced.

In fact, the current geopolitical dynamics in the U.N. renders a troubling irony to the international community as it embarks on its most ambitious sustainable development paradigm for the next 15 years.

Part of this Op-Ed can be read here.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Bhumika Muchhala of Third World Network. Credit: UN Photo/Paulo Filgueiras

By Bhumika Muchhala
ADDIS ABABA, Jul 22 2015 (IPS)

The third Financing for Development (FfD) conference in Addis Ababa concluded last Thursday, July 16, in bad faith as developed countries rejected a proposal for a global tax body and dismissed developing countries’ compromise proposal to strengthen the existing U.N. committee of tax experts.

Usually, when large conferences end after conflicts and climax in intergovernmental negotiations, there is a sense of exhilaration. This did not happen in Addis Ababa.The hallmark failure of the 3rd FfD conference is the missed opportunity to create an intergovernmental tax body, despite the persistent push into the 11th hour by a critical mass of developed countries led by India and Brazil.

Instead, there was deep disappointment amidst developing countries and many U.N. staff and outrage amidst civil society who had been following the FfD process over the last year. But among developed countries, there was relief, at best, or complacency, at worst. As the representative of Japan said in the final plenary, many developed countries, including Japan felt a sense of relief.

As the civil society coalition on FfD stated in its reaction to the outcome document, a fundamental opportunity was lost to tackle structural injustices in the current global economic system and ensure that development finance is people-centred and protects the environment.

Not only does the Addis Ababa outcome not rise to the world’s multiple crises, including finance, climate and distribution, it lacks the necessary ambition, leadership and actions to be associated with the post-2015 development agenda.

Indeed, the outcome is wholly inadequate to support the operational Means of Implementation (MOI) for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and exposes an unbridged gap between the rhetoric of aspirations in the post-2015 development agenda and the reality of the void of actions in the Addis Ababa outcome, which does not commit to new financial resources let alone scaling up existing resources.

In light of the agreements in the Monterrey Consensus and the Doha Declaration (in the first and second FfD conferences), the Addis Ababa Action Agenda displays a retrogression from the past, which undermines the FfD mandate to address international systemic issues in macroeconomic, financial, trade, tax and monetary policies.

The hallmark failure of the 3rd FfD conference is the missed opportunity to create an intergovernmental tax body, despite the persistent push into the 11th hour by a critical mass of developed countries led by India and Brazil.

Such a global tax body, that would enable the U.N. to have a norm-setting role in tax cooperation at an equal capacity to that of the current monopoly of the OECD, would have been a meaningful advancement in global economic governance and domestic resource mobilisation.

The intransigence of developed countries against such a key step demonstrated their unwillingness to democratise global economic governance and their disregard for FfD and U.N. standards of “good governance at all levels” and “rule of law.”

The core argument of developing countries is that given the reality that they are most affected by illicit financial flows, tax evasion and avoidance and transfer mis-pricing by large corporations, they should have an equal say at an international negotiation table on tax rules.

Given the glaring absence of new financial commitments, let alone the assurance of new and additional financial resources for climate and biodiversity finance, the majority of funds needed to finance the SDGs will come out of domestic budgets.

However, ample research shows how hundreds of billions of dollars are extracted out of the corporate tax purse of developing countries, particularly in the resource-rich African continent.

This is due to the very loopholes and tricks in the international tax architecture that is defined and dominated by the OECD. A global tax body could have shifted this power imbalance and delivered some fairness to global political economic structures.

The Addis Ababa outcome legitimises the predominance of private finance through blended finance and public-private partnerships (PPPs). This is problematic precisely because it is unattached to accountability measures or binding commitments based on international human and labour rights, and environmental standards.

A fast-growing body of evidence substantiates global concern over an unconditional support for PPPs and blended financing instruments. Without a parallel recognition of the developmental role of the state and robust safeguards to enable the state to regulate in the public interest, there is a great risk that the private sector undermines rather than supports sustainable development.

The Addis outcome’s blind trust in PPPs and blended finance is premised on the notion that such arrangements will lower the risk for private investment. The outcome makes no mention of the critical importance of inclusive and sustainable industrial development for developing countries, for the objectives of supporting economic diversification, adding value to raw materials and ascending the value chain, improving economic productivity and developing modern and appropriate technologies.

Civil society had hoped that being in Addis Ababa governments would remind themselves of the African Union’s Agenda 2063 based on shared prosperity through social and economic transformation.

Similarly, there is no critical assessment of trade regimes. Instead of safeguarding policy space, the Addis outcome fails to critically assess international trade policy in order to provide alternative paths to commodity-dependence, eliminate or at least review investor-state dispute settlement clauses, and undertake human rights impact and sustainability assessments of all trade agreements to ensure their alignment with the national and extraterritorial obligations of governments.

Furthermore, the additional steps to address gender equality and women’s empowerment seem to speak more to “Gender Equality as Smart Economics” than to women and girls’ entitlement to human rights and show a strong tendency towards the instrumentalisation of women by stating that women’s empowerment is vital to enhance economic growth and productivity.

The core competencies of FfD are comprised of international systemic issues such as capital flows, external debt, trade, financialisation and the monetary system.

The ability of the U.N. to address systemic issues is routinely challenged by developed countries who argue that these issues are outside the domain of the U.N.

Power and control over systemic issues and reforms are thus kept exclusively in the rich countries’ domain of the Bretton Woods Institutions (the IMF and World Bank), the G7 and the G20.

However, not only does the U.N. have a longstanding history in substantively analysing and proposing reforms on systemic issues, it is also the only universal forum where all countries, from the smallest island nation to the poorest landlocked country, have a voice and a vote in the General Assembly.

Part Two can be read here.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Bhumika Muchhala of Third World Network. Credit: UN Photo/Paulo Filgueiras

By Bhumika Muchhala
NEW YORK, Jul 9 2015 (IPS)

Lack of ambition and consensus in the New York negotiations begs the question of whether governments in Addis Ababa will salvage or further dilute the outcome of the Third International Conference on Financing for Development from July 13-16.

The establishment of a global tax body, a strong and independent follow-up process for FfD, the Rio principle of CBDR and the link between the post-2015 development agenda and the FFD agenda are among the central issues for the Addis Conference to resolve.To some degree, this dearth of intergovernmental consensus that leaves an open document maintains the pressure for final hour compromises in Addis Ababa.

After weeks of political impasse in the intergovernmental negotiations for the Third Conference on International Financing for Development (FfD), an open text to be negotiated in Addis Ababa next week was presented on July 7 by the FfD Co-Facilitators to government delegates and negotiators in New York.

Titled ‘The Addis Ababa Action Agenda of the Third International Conference on Financing for Development”, the draft outcome document, containing 134 paragraphs across 31 pages, is a result of numerous draft revisions beginning with the first ‘Elements Paper’ in January 2015.

Negotiations in New York gathered momentum in April and in the last few months have become heated and tense affairs marked by clashing positions between developed and developing countries and deep discontentment over both content and process.

The Co-Facilitators of the process, Ambassadors George Talbot of Guyana and Geir Pedersen of Norway, convened non-stop informal discussions and even smaller private meetings, all behind closed doors, in the last several weeks. Until mid-June, negotiations in plenary format were open and transparent to all, including via webcast, and interventions by civil society organisations (CSOs) were accepted from the floor.

However, recent informal meetings were explicitly closed, with CSOs being asked to leave the room at initial sessions when some individuals made attempts to observe the proceedings in person.

At the heart of the intergovernmental wrangling is a glaring lack of consensus, which the Co-Facilitators highlighted in their introduction to the final FfD plenary in New York.

Developed countries were intent on seeking to wrap up the negotiations in what would have been a diminished outcome compared to the agreed outcomes in the Monterrey Consensus of 2002 and the Doha Declaration of 2008, and what is needed for the current and future challenges of FfD.

On the other hand, developing countries continue to demand a more ambitious outcome.

Intergovernmental discussions commenced in October 2014 and evolved into negotiations by April 2015. However, rather than convergence on key actions and decisions, the conflicts and red lines became further entrenched for both developed and developing countries.

To some degree, this dearth of intergovernmental consensus that leaves an open document maintains the pressure for final hour compromises in Addis Ababa.

Parts of the text where tension is rife and where negotiation efforts will be targeted include the contentious and central decision to establish an intergovernmental, or global, tax body where developing countries have a voice in agenda-setting, as many developing countries have been arguing for, most notably India.

Developed countries are firmly against such an establishment and have ensured that the relevant language was deleted from earlier versions of the text and now Paragraph 29 refers only to the U.N. Committee of Experts on International Cooperation in Tax Matters and to enhance its resources and increase the frequency of its meetings to two sessions per year.

Besides international tax cooperation, the two other issues highlighted by the Co-Facilitators in the plenary were the conflict on the Rio Principle of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR) and the link between FfD and the post-2015 development agenda, including its core component of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the means of implementation (MOI) that the FfD outcome is to contribute toward.

The discord on CBDR has consumed a significant amount of time and space in the FfD negotiations, with sharp arguments for it propounded by the G77 and China group of 134 developing countries and arguments against it by developed countries, in particular the European Union and the United States.

The G77 has argued that if the 2015 FfD conference is to contribute to the MOI for the SDGs, the application of CBDR is indispensable for the political legitimacy of the FfD agenda.

The G77 explained how CBDR encapsulates universality, differentiation and responsibility: differentiation as the basis of crafting commitments; responsibility as the basis of delivering actionable MoI and for upholding the global partnership for development; and universality of the implementation of goals by all States.

Developed countries argued that CBDR only applies to environment and climate change-related issues, and that the North-South dichotomy is in today’s world anachronistic, and no longer reflects a world that has changed.

In response developing countries highlighted how the North-South gap in terms of inequality of consumption and production is still sharp and visceral in its magnitudes, and that if the SDGs have effectively mainstreamed environmental action across all goals and targets, it is only natural that the principle of CBDR is equally valid for the entire agenda of not only the post-2015 development agenda but also the FfD agenda.

The current text of July 7 refers in Paragraph 6 to the reaffirmation of “all the principles of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development.”

While this formulation does not specify CBDR, the principle as such is included on the whole and is a more favourable outcome than the danger of a redefinition or distortion of the principle.

The link between the FfD conference and the post-2015 development agenda is located in the articulation of MOI. Developed countries have been clear that the FfD outcome is to comprise all of the MOI for the post-2015 development agenda, whereas developing countries have been resolute in the nuance that while the FfD outcome contributes significantly to the MOI for the post-2015 development agenda, it does not by any means comprise the whole of the MOI.

This argument has been central to developing countries’ call for a follow-up process for FfD that is distinct and independent from the follow-up process of the post-2015 development agenda.

The text of July 7 reflects this position of developing countries in Paragraph 19, in the formulation that reads: “The post-2015 development agenda, including the SDGs, can be met within the framework of a revitalized global partnership for sustainable development, supported by the concrete policies and actions as outlined in the present Action Agenda.”

Part Two can be found here.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon addresses the opening of the high level dinner, “Making 2015 a Historic Year”, during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 23, 2015. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 11 2015 (IPS)

The United Nations, in a sustained political hype, is touting 2015 as a likely breakthrough year for several key issues on its agenda – primarily development financing, climate change, sustainable development, disaster risk-reduction and nuclear non-proliferation.

At the same time, the world body is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year while also commemorating the 20th anniversary of the historic Beijing Conference on Women which strengthened gender empowerment worldwide."Above all, it is a reminder that the world’s states are acting, as usual, irresponsibly. And that we need a world that functions far better if we are to survive the threats and challenges of the twenty-first century." -- James Paul

In a report titled ‘The Road to Dignity by 2030: Ending Poverty, Transforming All Lives and Protecting the Planet’ released last month, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said 2015 is “the time for global action.”

The upcoming events include the Third World Conference on Disaster-Risk Reduction in Sendai, Japan in March; the five-year review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation (NPT) Treaty in April-May in New York; and the Third International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD) in Addis Ababa in July.

Speaking to reporters last week, the secretary-general singled out three priorities “I have been repeating all the time.”

“We have to do the utmost efforts to meet the targets of the Millennium Development Goals (ending 2015). Then the Member States are working very hard to shape the post-2015 development agenda by September.”

The United Nations will host a special summit of world leaders, Sep. 25 to 27, and “we expect that most of the world leaders will be here and discuss and adopt and declare as their vision to the world, aiming by 2030, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs),” he added.

And in December this year, he said, “we must have a universal, meaningful climate change agreement” in talks scheduled to take place in Paris.

At each of these “milestones,” he pointed out, “we will continue to be ambitious to end poverty, reduce inequality and exploit the opportunities that accompany the climate challenge.”

As for the 70th anniversary, he said, it will be “an important moment for serious reflection on our achievements and setbacks”.

But Jim Paul, who monitored the United Nations for over 19 years as executive director of the New York-based Global Policy Forum, told IPS he was sceptical of the political hype surrounding the upcoming conferences.

“The United Nations has been trumpeting the global meetings of 2015 as watershed events, but real world expectations are lagging behind the rhetoric of the secretary-general and his team,” he said.

Paul said there are several issues to bear in mind: while the U.N.’s summits address some of the world’s most pressing issues, powerful member states like the United States usually seek to weaken the events and prevent strong outcomes.

This trend was already visible in the 1990s, the golden decade of U.N. summits, when Washington began to insist that summits were too “expensive” and reached too far, said Paul, a onetime lecturer and assistant professor of political science at Empire State College in the State University of New York system.

“That policy reached its most extreme form in the run-up to the summit of 2005, when the U.S. insisted on a massive, last-minute re-working of the agreed text, but it can be found in many other cases before and since,” he said.

Paul pointed out that powerful states, the U.S. first and foremost, do not like to be limited by U.N.-based decisions.

Second, there is the problem of the lack of binding outcomes to these global events.

He said grand aspirations are often expressed in the outcome documents, and the word “binding” is sometimes used, but all participants know that the outcome will remain aspirational – not tough, compelling policy to be adhered to.

This gives rise to cynicism among the diplomats and especially among the public, urged by governments to blame “the U.N.” for its supposedly feckless behaviour (whilst they themselves are often at fault), he declared.

At a press conference last month, the president of the 193-member General Assembly, Sam Kutesa, said 70 years after the founding of the United Nations “we have a truly historic opportunity to agree on an inspiring agenda that can energize the international community, governments everywhere and the citizens of the world.”

“We must be ready to seize this challenge,” he added.

Speaking on the specifics of SDGs, Chee Yoke Ling, director of programmes at the Penang-based Third World Network, told IPS while the incorporation of the SDGs is an important part of the post-2015 development agenda, “We need to put the economic agenda as a priority for the Development Summit.”

She said financial instabilities “continue to loom before us, while increasingly anti-people and anti-development trade rules are being pushed by major developed countries in bilateral and plurilateral trade agreements such as the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement.

“The notoriety of transnational investors suing national governments for hundreds of millions of dollars under bilateral investment agreements has triggered protests in many countries, with some developing country governments reviewing and even terminating those grossly unfair treaties. “

She said the Addis Ababa conference is crucial for addressing several fundamental financial and economic issues – without structural reforms that respect national policy space and ensure stability, sustainable development will remain elusive.

Paul told IPS there are various alternative policy venues, such as the World Bank, the G-8, the G-20, the IMF, and so on.

The United Nations must confront the challenge of great powers who take decisions in venues they prefer and according to their own priorities and timetables.

Washington is certainly not the only U.N. member state to act this way, but as the biggest and richest, it has the strongest inclination to act according to its own perceived interests and not in a broadly consultative process, he said.

“Finally, we should remember the difficult policy context of 2015 – the deep crisis of climate change that requires decisions that go very far and necessarily upset the comfortable assumptions of the existing global order,” Paul noted.

Reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 85 percent is so radical a goal that no one even wants to think about it, much less create policy around it, said Paul.

And creating a fair, stable and just global economic order under the Sustainable Development Goals appears also nearly impossible in a global economy that is stumbling seriously and creating ever-greater inequality. Will the world’s oligarchs concede power and revenues? he asked.

Does all this mean that the U.N.’s aspirational summit meetings in 2015 are useless or downright negative? Not necessarily.

“To know that we cannot expect a miracle is perhaps a valuable adjustment of our unreasonable expectations and a way to think more realistically about what can and cannot be accomplished,” Paul said.

“Above all, it is a reminder that the world’s states are acting, as usual, irresponsibly. And that we need a world that functions far better if we are to survive the threats and challenges of the twenty-first century.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

Climate change effects, such as extreme weather events, will only increase without aggressive mitigation actions. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
BONN, Oct 22 2014 (IPS)

The 410,000 people who took to the streets for climate action in New York City during the U.N. Climate Summit would have been outraged by the 90-minute delay and same-old political posturing at the first day of a crucial round of climate treaty negotiations in Bonn at the World Congress Center.

Countries blatantly ignored organisers’pleas to keep their opening statements short in order to get to work during the last week of talks before COP 20 in Lima, Peru Dec. 1-12. “Only a global social movement will force nations to act.” -- Hans Joachim Schellnhuber

COP 20 is where a draft climate treaty intended to prevent catastrophic overheating of the planet will take form. One year later, the leaders of nearly 200 countries are to sign a new climate treaty in Paris. If the treaty is not strong enough to ensure that countries rapidly abandon fossil fuels, then hundreds of millions will suffer and nations will collapse.

The current draft treaty is nowhere near strong enough, and country negotiators are “sleepwalking”in Bonn while “the climate science only gets more dire,”Hilary Chiew from Third World Network, a civil society organisation, told negotiators here.

Delegates are used to one or two official “interventions”by the public which are strictly time-limited and often no more than 90 seconds. Despite the passion and eloquence of many of these, few officials are moved and most can do little but follow instructions given them weeks ago by their governments.

“Sticking to positions is not negotiating,”meeting co-chair Kishan Kumarsingh of Trinidad and Tobago reminded negotiators.

There are very few members of the public and civil society in Bonn to witness how many countries’stuck to their short-term, self-interested positions than in facing humanity’s greatest ever challenge. After 20 years, these negotiations have become ‘business as usual’ themselves and seem set to continue another 20 years.

“Only a global social movement will force nations to act,”said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber,  director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

Schellnhuber, a leading climate expert and former science advisor to the German government, is not in Bonn but participated in September’s U.N. Climate Summit in New York along with leaders from 120 nations. The Summit was all rhetoric and no commitments to action, yet again, he told IPS.

Without the People’s Climate March, the U.N. Summit was a failure, while the march – with 410,000 people on the streets of Manhattan – was “awesome”and “inspiring”, he said.

The two-degree C target is the only thing all nations have agreed on. Although a two-degree C rise in global temperatures is “unprecedented in human history”, it is far better than three C or worse, he said.

Achieving the two C target is still possible, according to a report by leading climate and energy experts. The Tackling the Challenge of Climate Change report outlines various steps, including increased energy efficiency in all sectors — building retrofits, for example, can achieve 70-90 percent reductions.

An effective price on carbon is also needed, one that reflects the enormous health and environmental costs of burning fossil fuels. Massive increases in wind and solar PV and closing down all ineffecient coal plants is also crucial.

Most important of all, governments need to make climate a priority. Germany and Denmark are well along this path to creating low-carbon economies and benefiting from less pollution and creation of a new economic sector, the report notes.

Making climate a top priority for all governments will take a global social movement involving tens of millions of people. Once the business sector realises the transition to a low-carbon world is underway, they will push governments to create policies needed for a low-carbon societies.

“Solutions to climate change are the biggest business opportunity in history,” Schellnhuber said.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Coral reefs are the rainforests of the seas, providing food, resources and coastal protection to millions of people around the world. Yet they are on the frontline of destruction. At this Bonaire reef, the olive-green coral is alive, but the mottled-gray coral is dead. Credit: Living Oceans Foundation/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 15 2014 (IPS)

When political leaders from climate-threatened Small Island Developing States (SIDS) addressed the U.N. General Assembly last month, there was one recurring theme: the urgent need to protect the high seas and preserve the world’s marine biodiversity.

“I have come to the United Nations compelled by the dictates of my conscience,” pleaded President Emanuel Mori of the Federated States of Micronesia."In the long-term, there are no winners on this planet if we lose the fight against climate change and biodiversity loss." -- Nathalie Rey of Greenpeace International

“We are all stewards of God’s creation here on earth. The bounties of Mother Nature are priceless. We all bear the obligation to sustainably manage them.”

An equally poignant appeal came from President Christopher Loeak of the Marshall Islands: “The Pacific Ocean and its rich resources are our lifeline. We are the custodians of our own vast resources on behalf of future generations.”

“Our suffering could have been prevented by the United Nations – if only you had listened,” he told delegates, pointing an accusing finger at the world body for dereliction of duty.

A two-week long Conference of the State Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 12), currently underway in South Korea and continuing through Oct. 17, will finalise a road map to protect and preserve biodiversity, including oceans, forests, genetic resources, wildlife, agricultural land and ecosystems.

A report titled ‘Global Biodiversity Outlook 4‘ (GBO-4) released last week provides an assessment of the progress made towards achieving biodiversity targets set at a meeting in Nagoya, in Japan’s Aichi Prefecture, back in October 2010.

Nathalie Rey, deputy political director of Greenpeace International, told IPS the U.N. report monitoring “the miserable progress to date of implementation of the world’s government’s 10-year plan to save life on Earth shows that sustainable development is still a distant dream.”

Whilst small steps have been made, she said, it is going to require a giant leap forward to get the world on track to slow down and curb biodiversity loss altogether.

Rey pointed out that healthy and productive oceans are the backbone of the planet, and essential in the fight against poverty and ensuring food security. Coral reefs are the rainforests of the seas, providing food, resources and coastal protection to millions of people around the world. Yet the report highlights that they are on the frontline of destruction, she added.

“We continue to plunder them of fish, choke them with pollution and alter them forever with the impacts of human-induced climate change,” she said.

The acidification of oceans from the increased absorption of carbon dioxide in particular is having widespread effects on these coral ecosystems.

Reflecting another perspective, Alice Martin-Prevel, policy analyst at the Oakland Institute, a progressive think tank based in San Francisco, told IPS biodiversity preservation targets will never be achieved without secured access to land for farmers and safeguarding small holders’ ability to invest sustainably in their production activity.

She said the World Bank continues to produce business indicators, such as ‘Doing Business’ and the new ‘Benchmarking the Business Agriculture Project’, to encourage governments to create private land markets and open up to imported hybrid seeds and chemical fertilisers.

“This is why we launched the ‘Our Land Our Business’ campaign to protest the Bank’s business-friendly agenda and selling of countries’ ecosystems and land to foreign investors,” Martin-Prevel said.

She added that this jeopardises equal and environmentally-sustainable development.

Chee Yoke Ling, director of programmes at the Malaysia-based Third World Network, told IPS resource mobilisation remains elusive.

She said the second report of the High Level Panel presented to the ongoing COP12 reiterates that estimates at global, regional and national levels all point to a substantial gap between the investments needed to deliver biodiversity targets and the resources currently allocated.

This is true for all of the 2010 Aichi Targets, she added.

The report referred to a 2012 review that estimated current levels of global funding for biodiversity at between 51 and 53 billion dollars annually, compared to estimated needs of 300 to 400 billion dollars annually.

“Although the developed country parties have legally committed to provide new and additional financial resources to meet the full incremental cost of implementing the CBD, this commitment, as with other environmental treaties, has not been honoured,” Ling said.

She said a regular excuse used now is about the current economic condition of developed countries which has restrained development funding.

Rey of Greenpeace International told IPS that without concerted efforts to keep climate change under control, “we will see irreversible damage to coral reefs and other vulnerable habitats, with devastating consequences for marine life and those people that directly depend on them for work and protein.”

Building resilience through the establishment of an extensive network of marine reserves – ocean sanctuaries free of industrial activities – will be an essential tool to help the marine world adapt to climate change and protect against other stressors such as overfishing and destructive fishing practices.

This is a target that governments are still lagging way behind on, she said.

In 2012, world governments committed to double funding towards addressing biodiversity loss. Still, shrinking state budgets are negatively affecting funding for environmental conservation. This points to a continued lack of understanding of the huge economic returns from investing in biodiversity protection, said Rey.

Furthermore, the cost of not acting now far outweighs the costs of acting in the future. There are sufficient sources of money, but it is often a case of redirecting these sources towards sustainable activities, she noted.

Rey also said a clear starting point identified by the Convention for Biological Diversity (CBD) will be to reallocate harmful subsidies to conservation.

It has been estimated, said Rey, that a staggering one trillion dollars or more of public money is spent by governments every year on subsidies harmful to the environment, including the agriculture, forestry and fishing sectors.

Yet whilst the report notes there is an increasing recognition of harmful subsidies, very little action has been taken.

The current U.N. report hopefully acts as a half-time reality check that forces a major game change in the second half of this decade. Green groups say governments and companies should stop defending destructive activities, like oil drilling in the Arctic, ancient deforestation and agricultural activities that promote industrial, chemical- dependent monocultures.

“Because in the long-term there are no winners on this planet if we lose the fight against climate change and biodiversity loss,” Rey declared.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

Women are the backbone of the farming sector and have a crucial role to play in improving nutrition through food preparation and the education of children. Credit: UN Photo/Marco Dormino

By Gloria Schiavi
ROME, Oct 15 2014 (IPS)

It does not make the headlines, but 2014 is the International Year of Family Farming (IYFF) and family farming will be centre-stage at this year’s World Food Day on Oct. 16 at the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO).

“If we are serious about fighting hunger we need to promote family farming as a way of production and also […] as a way of life. It is much more than a way of agricultural production”, says Marcela Villarreal, Director of FAO’s Office for Partnerships, Advocacy and Capacity Development.

According to FAO, family farming – which is the largest employer in the world – can help combat hunger and poverty and contribute to healthy food systems. It can also play a role in protecting the environment and managing natural resources in a sustainable way.Family farming is estimated to provide 70 percent of the food produced in the world, sustain 40 percent of households worldwide and is twice more effective in reducing poverty than any other productive sector.

There is no official definition for family farming, which sometimes replaces the term ‘smallholders’, but its key features are family ownership and the use of mainly non-wage labour provided by family members.

Family farming is estimated to provide 70 percent of the food produced in the world, sustain 40 percent of households worldwide and is twice more effective in reducing poverty than any other productive sector.

A FAO working paper, which used figures from the World Census of Agriculture, calculates that “there are more than 570 million farms in the world and more than 500 million of these are owned by families.”

The paper also notes that 84 percent of the world’s farms are smaller than two hectares and operate on about 12 percent of the world’s farmland. The remaining 16 percent of farms are larger than two hectares and represent 88 percent of farmland.

East and South Asia along with the Pacific account for 74 percent of the 570 million farms, with China and India accounting for 35 and 24 percent respectively. Only three percent of farms are located in the Middle East and North Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean represent four percent each.

Farmers’ organisations from Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania met in Abu Dhabi in January at the start of IYFF and issued a set of five demands to make family farming the “cornerstone of solid sustainable rural development, conceived of as an integral part of the global and harmonised development of each nation and each people while preserving the environment and natural resources.”

Among others, they called for strategies to attract young people and prevent migration, creating the conditions for them to take over their parents’ farms or set up new farms.

With regards to gender equality, they criticised discrimination over inheritance rules and wages as unacceptable, saying that women are the backbone of the farming sector and have a crucial role to play in improving nutrition through food preparation and the education of children.

The farmers’ organisations also called on governments to finance the creation of cooperatives, and guarantee access to markets and loans for smallholders.

According to José Antonio Osaba, Coordinator of the IYFF-2014 Civil Society Programme of the World Rural Forum, all nations, and especially developing nations, “have the right to protect their agriculture so as to be able to feed themselves and trade under equitable conditions … the reverse is now the case: a small handful of major exporting nations with high productivity levels and considerable subsidies dominate the world food market.”

Ranja Sengupta, senior researcher at the Third World Network in India, shares Osaba’s position. On the side-lines of the Asia-Europe Peoples’ Forum held in Milan, Italy, on Oct. 10-12, she told IPS that free trade agreements pose a serious problem for the capability of developing countries to sustain their people.

“I think in countries like India, large countries with a large, hungry population, there is no alternative to strengthening small family-based farms”, she said.

“We cannot depend on imported food. So for us, if we have to provide food to our people, we have to take it from our producers and we have to ensure that they are able to produce; that’s why we do need to give essential subsidies – at least for now”, she added.

“It is something which should be non-negotiable for any developing country government and no global agreement should be able to actually say ‘no’ to that”, Sengupta concluded.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Critics say the agrochemical and biotechnology markets are dominated by a few mega companies that have a vested interest in maintaining monoculture farming systems which are carbon-intensive and depend on external inputs. Credit: Patrick Burnett/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 24 2014 (IPS)

On the sidelines of the U.N.’s heavily hyped Climate Summit, the newly-launched Global Alliance for Climate-Smart Agriculture announced plans to protect some 500 million farmers worldwide from climate change and “help achieve sustainable and equitable increases in agricultural productivity and incomes.”

But the announcement by the Global Alliance, which includes more than 20 governments, 30 organisations and corporations, including Fortune 500 companies McDonald’s and Kelloggs, was greeted with apprehension by a coalition of over 100 civil society organisations (CSOs)."These companies will do all they can to maintain their market dominance and prevent genuine agroecology agriculture from gaining ground in countries." -- Meenakshi Raman of Third World Network

It is a backhanded gesture, warned the coalition, which “rejected” the announcement as “a deceptive and deeply contradictory initiative.”

“The Global Alliance for Climate-Smart Agriculture will not deliver the solutions that we so urgently need. Instead, climate-smart agriculture provides a dangerous platform for corporations to implement the very activities we oppose,” the coalition said.

“By endorsing the activities of the planet’s worst climate offenders in agribusiness and industrial agriculture, the Alliance will undermine the very objectives that it claims to aim for.”

The 107 CSOs include ActionAid International, Friends of the Earth International, the International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements, the South Asia Alliance for Poverty Eradication, the Third World Network, the Bolivian Platform on Climate Change, Biofuel Watch and the National Network on Right to Food.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who gave his blessing to the Global Alliance, said: “I am glad to see action that will increase agricultural productivity, build resilience for farmers and reduce carbon emissions.”

These efforts, he said, will improve food and nutrition security for billions of people.

With demand for food set to increase 60 per cent by 2050, agricultural practices are transforming to meet the challenge of food security for the world’s 9.0 billion people while reducing emissions, he asserted.

But the coalition said: “Although some organisations have constructively engaged in good faith for several months with the Global Alliance to express serious concerns, these concerns have been ignored.”

Instead, the Alliance “is clearly being structured to serve big business interests, not to address the climate crisis,” the coalition said.

The coalition also pointed out that companies with activities resulting in dire social impacts on farmers and communities, such as those driving land grabbing or promoting genetically modified (GM) seeds, already claim they are climate-smart.

Yara (the world’s largest fertiliser manufacturer), Syngenta (GM seeds), McDonald’s, and Walmart are all at the climate-smart table,
it added. “Climate-smart agriculture will serve as a new promotional space for the planet’s worst social and environmental offenders in agriculture.

“The proposed Global Alliance on Climate-Smart Agriculture seems to be yet another strategy by powerful players to prop up industrial agriculture, which undermines the basic human right to food. It is nothing new, nothing innovative, and not what we need,” the coalition declared.

Meenakshi Raman, coordinator of the Climate Change Programme at the Malaysia-based Third World Network, told IPS the world seed, agrochemical and biotechnology markets are dominated by a few mega companies.

She said these companies have a vested interest in maintaining monoculture farming systems which are carbon intensive and depend on external inputs.

“These companies will do all they can to maintain their market dominance and prevent genuine agroecology agriculture from gaining ground in countries,” she said.

It is vital that such oligopoly practices are disallowed and regulated, said Raman. “Hence the need for radical overhaul of the current unfair systems in place with real reform at the international level.”

Meanwhile, the Washington-based Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), said the world’s foremost agriculture experts have determined that preventing climate change from damaging food production and destabilising some of the world’s most volatile regions will require reaching out to at least half a billion farmers, fishers, pastoralists, livestock keepers and foresters.

The goal is to help them learn farming techniques and obtain farming technologies that will allow them to adapt to more stressful production conditions and also reduce their own contributions to climate change, said CGIAR.

These researchers are already working with farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia to refine new climate-oriented technologies and techniques via what are essentially outdoor laboratories for innovations called climate-smart villages.

The villages’ approach to crafting climate change solutions is proving extremely popular with all involved, and now the Indian state of Maharashtra (population 112.3 million) plans to set up 1,000 climate smart villages, CGIAR said.

Asked for specifics, Bruce Campbell, director of the CGIAR Research Programme on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), told IPS countries in the tropics will be particularly impacted, especially those that are already under-developed because such countries don’t have the resources to adapt and respond to extreme weather conditions.

These include many countries in the Sahel region, Bangladesh, India and Indonesia, plus countries in Latin America.

Asked if these countries are succeeding in coping with the impending crisis, he said there are good cases of isolated successes, but in general they are not coping.

For example, one success is in Niger where five million trees have been planted, that help both adaptation and mitigation, but an enormous number of other activities are needed, he added.

Raman told IPS there are many rules in the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) agriculture agreement that threaten small-scale agriculture and agroecology farming systems in the developing world.

She said developed countries are allowed to provide billions of dollars in subsidies to their agricultural producers whose products are then exported and dumped on developing countries, whose farming systems are then displaced or threatened with artificially cheap products.

Many developing countries, she pointed out, were also forced to remove the protection they had or have for their domestic agriculture, either through the WTO, the World Bank policies under structural adjustment and free trade agreements.

“These policies do not allow developing country governments to protect small farmers and their domestic agriculture,” she said.

Such rules and policies are unfair and unethical and should not be allowed as they undermine small farmers and agroecology systems,
Raman declared.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

Climate defenders line the entrance to the National Stadium in Warsaw where the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP19 was held last October. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Meenakshi Raman
PENANG, Sep 17 2014 (IPS)

As the United Nations hosts a Climate Summit Sep. 23, the lingering question is whether the meeting of world leaders will wind up as another talk fest.

It is most likely that it could go that way. The problem is that developed countries are pressuring developing countries to indicate their pledges for emissions reductions post-2020 under the Paris deal which is currently under negotiation, without any indication of whether they will provide any finance or enable technology transfer – which are current commitments under the Convention.Asking developing countries to undertake more commitments without any financial resources or technology transfer is not only contrary to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change but is also immoral.

What is worse is that many developed countries – especially the U.S. and its allies – are delaying making their contributions to the Green Climate Fund (GCF).

The GCF was launched in 2011 and it was agreed in Cancun, Mexico in 2010 that developed countries will mobilise 100 billion dollars per year by 2020.

The GCF has yet to receive any funds that can be disbursed to developing countries to undertake their climate actions.

Worse, there is a grave reluctance to indicate the size and scale of the resources that will be put into the GCF for its initial capitalisation. Only Germany so far has indicated that it is willing to contribute one billion dollars to the Fund. Others have been deafeningly silent.

The G77 and China, had in Bonn, Germany in June, called for at least 15 billion dollars to be put into the GCF as its initial capital. The Climate Summit must focus on this to get developed countries to announce their finance commitments to the Fund.

If it does not, the UNFCCC meeting in Lima will be in jeopardy, as this is an existing obligation of developed countries that must be met latest by November.

This is the most important issue in confidence building to enable developing countries to meet their adaptation and mitigation needs. Otherwise, without real concrete and finance commitments, the New York summit will be meaningless.

Asking developing countries to undertake more commitments without any financial resources or technology transfer is not only contrary to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change but is also immoral.

In Cancun, many developing countries already indicated what they were willing to do in terms of emissions reductions for the pre-2020 time frame and many of them had conditioned those actions on the promise of finance and technology transfer.

Despite this, the GCF remains empty and no technology transfer has really been delivered.

The other issue is whether developed countries will raise their targets for emissions reductions, as currently, their pledges are very low.
In 2012 in Doha, Qatar, developed countries that are in the Kyoto Protocol (such as the European Union, Norway, Australia, New Zealand. Switzerland and others but not including the U.S., Canada and Japan) agreed to re-visit the commitments they made for a second commitment period from 2013-2020.

The total emissions that they had agreed to was a reduction of only 17 percent by 2020 for developed countries, compared to 1990 levels. This was viewed by developing countries as very low, given that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had in their 4th Assessment Report referred to a range of 25-40 percent emissions reductions by 2020 compared to 1990 levels for developed countries.

It was agreed in Doha that the developed countries in the Kyoto Protocol (KP) would revisit their ambition by 2014. Hence, whether this will be realised in Lima remains to be seen. So whatever announcements are made in New York will not amount to much if the cuts do not amount to at least 40 percent reductions by 2020 on the part of developed countries.

Developed countries that are not in the Kyoto Protocol such as the United States, Canada and Japan were urged to do comparable efforts in emissions reductions as those in the KP.

It is not likely at all that these countries will raise their ambition level at all, given that both Japan and Canada announced that they will actually increase their emission levels from what they had announced previously in Cancun!

For the U.S., the emission reduction pledge that they put forth is very low, amounting to only a reduction of about three percent by 2020 compared to 1990 levels. For the world’s biggest historic emitter, this is doing too little, too late.

It is against this backdrop that the elements for a new agreement which is to take effect post-2020 is to be finalised in Lima, with a draft negotiating text to be ready early next year.

If the pre-2020 ambition is very low both in terms of the emission reductions of developed countries and the lack of resources in the GCF, the basis for the 2015 agreement will be seriously jeopardised.

Without any leadership shown by developed countries, developing countries will be reluctant to undertake more ambitious action. Hence, the race to the bottom in climate action is real.

If the Climate Summit does not address the failure of developed countries to meet their existing obligations which were agreed to under the UNFCCC, it will indeed turn into a mere talkshop that attempts to provide a smokescreen for inaction on their part.

Another lingering question: Can the private sector, which is expected to play a key role in the summit, be trusted on climate change?

It is the private sector in the first place that got us into this climate mess. Big corporations cannot be trusted to bring about the real changes that are needed as there will be much green-washing.

Companies are profit-seeking and they would only engage in activities that will bring them profits. There are huge lobbies in the climate arena who are pushing false approaches such as trading in carbon and other market mechanisms and instruments through which they seek to make more profits.

For example, there is a big push for ‘ Climate Smart Agriculture” with big corporations and the World Bank in the forefront.

There is no definition yet on what is ‘climate smart’ and there are grave concerns from civil society and farmers movements that such policies being pushed by big corporations who are in the frontline of controversial genetic engineering, industrial chemicals and carbon markets.

Many criticise the CSA approach which does not exclude any practices—which means that GMOs, pesticides, and fertilisers, so long as they contribute to soil carbon sequestration, would be permissible and even encouraged.

Such approaches not only contribute to environmental and social problems but they also also undermine one of the most important social benefits of agroecology: reducing farmers’ dependence on external inputs. Yet CSA is touted as a positive initiative at the New York Summit – a clear cut case of green-washing.

Real solutions in agriculture are those which are sustainable and based on agroecology in the hands of small farmers and communities- not in the hands of the big corporations who were responsible for much of the emissions in industrial agriculture.

The same can be said about the Sustainable Energy for All – with big corporations driving the agenda – where the interests of those who really are deprived of energy access will not be prioritised.

This is because the emphasis is on centralised modern energy systems that are expensive and not affordable to those who need them the most undermines the very objective it is set to serve in term of ensuring universal access to modern energy services.

If these initiatives are touted as ‘solutions’ to climate change, then we are in big trouble – for they are not the real kind of solutions needed.

A lot is being said about creating enabling environments in developing countries to attract private investments.

It is for developing countries to put in place their national climate plans and in that context, gauge which private sector can play a role, in what sector and how to do so, including the involvement of small and medium entrepreneurs, including farmers, fisherfolk, indigenous peoples etc.

But developed countries are pushing the interests of their big corporations in the name of attracting new types of green foreign investments. Such approaches are new conditionalities.

Any role of the private sector is only supplemental and cannot be a substitute for the provision of real financial resources and technology transfer to developing countries to undertake their action. This clearly cannot be classified as climate finance.

Developed country governments in passing on the responsibility for addressing climate change to the private sector are abdicating the commitments that they have under the climate change Convention. This is irresponsible and reprehensible.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Wind energy is slowly taking off in Kenya. Credit: Miriam Mannak/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 10 2014 (IPS)

When the United Nations inaugurated the first-ever global forum on renewable energy last week, it provided a laundry list of financial pledges aimed at achieving one of the world body’s most ambitious goals: sustainable energy for all (SE4ALL) by 2030.

The forum specifically focused on the developing world where one out of five people are without access to basic energy: electricity.

According to the United Nations, Norway is expected to spend about 330 million dollars for global renewable energy this year, while Bank of America’s Green Bond has pledged some 500 million dollars over three years as part of a 10-year 50-billion-dollar environmental business commitment.

The collective 50-billion-dollar pledge was made by big businesses at the Rio+20 conference in Brazil in June 2012.

"With the Sustainable Energy For All Initiative being dominated largely by big energy corporations, multilateral development banks and private capital who seek commercial returns, it is doubtful if the interests of the energy deprived will be met at all." -- Meena Raman of the Malaysia-based Third World Network
Additionally, the Organisation for Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has created a one-billion-dollar fund for energy access.

And the African Development Bank has approved sustainable energy projects totaling some two billion dollars and mobilised co-financing totaling about 4.5 billion dollars.

Brazil, meanwhile, has reached out to nearly 15 million people, once living in veritable darkness, with its ‘Light for All’ programme.

Still, the commitments and achievements fall far short of the overall target for SE4ALL.

World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said last year that financing was the key to resolving the energy crisis, with a staggering 600 to 800 billion dollars needed a year from now until 2030.

He said the three goals are: access to energy, energy efficiency and renewable energy.

“We are now starting in countries in which demand for action is most urgent,” he said, pointing out that “in some of these countries, only one in 10 people has access to electricity. It is time for that to change.”

But to make that change, the United Nations has been marshalling resources, mostly from the private sector, big business and international organisations.

At the just-concluded forum, some of the corporate participants included senior officials from Bank of America, Citigroup, Coca Cola, Deutsche Bank, Royal Dutch Shell, Philips Lighting, Statoil and Sumitomo Chemical.

The meeting was attended by nearly a thousand delegates, including government leaders, energy practitioners, representatives of international organisations and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

But civil rights groups and activists in the energy sector are sceptical about the role of big business.

Dipti Bhatnagar, climate justice and energy coordinator at Friends of the Earth International (FoEI), told IPS the SE4ALL initiative “has been co-opted by dirty energy corporations” and the United Nations is therefore not in a position to realise its goal.

The funders are led by an unaccountable, handpicked group dominated by representatives of multinational corporations, including oil giants such as Shell, that are investing billions in fossil fuels exploitation around the world, she charged.

“We have warned [U.N. Secretary-General] Ban Ki-moon that the SE4ALL and other U.N. initiatives have been captured by dirty energy corporations which use them to greenwash their image,” said Bhatnagar.

These companies are obstructing “the rapid transformation needed to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and achieve a just and sustainable energy system.”

Meena Raman of the Malaysia-based Third World Network was equally apprehensive about the involvement of big business in SE4ALL.

“With the Sustainable Energy For All Initiative being dominated largely by big energy corporations, multilateral development banks (MDBs) and private capital who seek commercial returns, it is doubtful if the interests of the energy deprived will be met at all,” she told IPS.

The emphasis on centralised modern energy systems, which are expensive and not affordable to those who need them the most, undermines the very objective it is set to serve in term of ensuring universal access to modern energy services, Raman pointed out.

The objective of “ensuring universal access to modern energy services” must ensure that universal access needs to be prioritised.

She said a large percentage of the world’s poor in the developing countries get their survival energy needs from either collected or low-cost local-market-based traditional energy sources (which are under increasing threats from mining, expansion of urbanisation, industrialisation etc.).

“This is not necessarily because there are no modern energy services available in that society or locality, but largely because these poor people cannot afford those modern (and higher cost) energy services.”

Forcing the poor to the commercial energy market without foolproof systems to guarantee energy access for the poor will create more deprivations, more inequities, more distress, she argued.

Addressing the forum, Ban said,”Sustainable development is not possible without sustainable energy.”

Ban also launched the U.N. Decade of Sustainable Energy for All (2014-2024) focusing on energy for women and children’s health during the initial two years.

Bhatnagar told IPS the world’s current energy system is unsustainable and unjust.

“It is harming communities, workers, the environment and the climate.”

“To provide sustainable energy to those who are now excluded, we urgently need to transform our current, corporate-controlled energy system into one that empowers people to build clean, democratically controlled, renewable energy systems,” she warned.

Raman told IPS the first priority should be to drastically reduce the threats to the poor’s free access to free or low-cost energy services (while improving their quality of use with modern technological/technical & social inputs – and this has multiple benefits, including the health of women and small children).

She said the objective of providing “modern energy services” to those without such services at present, can thus be achieved only when the state plays a policy-determined role, and the market economy is strongly regulated to take cognizance of the widely differing capacities to buy energy services.

She said it cannot be done by de-regulating and privatising such services to big capital and markets.

“Too much emphasis on the private sector and market-economy is bound to concentrate more modern energy access to those who can afford to buy.”

Thus, the role of enlightened and inclusive state policies and actions will be paramount and should increase, rather than decrease, said Raman.

(END)

Many children in Nepal, part of the LDCs since 1971, continue to die from curable diseases. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Samuel Oakford
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 25 2013 (IPS)

The world’s poorest countries are rethinking economic policies that – even during periods of breakneck growth – have failed to provide quality employment capable of matching a demographic boom.

The disparity between growth and jobs is no starker than in the 49 Least Developed Countries (LDCs), which, according to a recent U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) report, will need to create 16 million positions every year if they are to keep up with new entrants into their rapidly expanding workforces.Commodity prices, which the IMF expects to steadily drop in coming years, have dictated hiring – and firing.

For decades, despite criticism from the U.N. and elsewhere, LDC governments were urged by multilateral lenders to cut public spending, curb inflation and end trade tariffs that protected domestic industries.

But today’s ubiquitous “jobless growth” has countries looking in the opposite direction.

“These countries have gone through radical policy reforms,” said Mussie Delelegn, officer-in-charge at UNCTAD’s New York Office. “In the 1980s many of them implemented structural adjustment programmes. The assumption that growth would automatically translate into employment and poverty reduction has not been seen.”

Though the percentage of people living in extreme poverty (less than 1.25 dollars per day) has declined in LDCs, their numbers have increased due to population growth.

While the economies of LDCs expanded yearly by over 7.5 percent in the decade before the 2008 financial crisis, employment growth per annum stood at just 2.9 percent between 2000-2012, barely ahead of the population growth rate of 2.3 percent.

Unemployment numbers, which have remained steady at roughly 5.5 percent, can’t be used in the ways they are in developed countries. The vast majority of employment is tenuous and offers little in the way of security – in 2010 over 80 percent of jobs in LDCs were considered “vulnerable.”

In 2011, the Istanbul Programme of Action concluded that to eradicate poverty and achieve inclusive growth, LDCs would have to grow by at least seven percent annually between 2011-2020. But the U.N. estimates most LDCs will miss that target by one to two percent in the next several years.

If high growth couldn’t buoy the job market during boom years, a period of slower increases will require specifically catered policies to spur employment.

Monetary policy “should be less fixated on attaining an inflation rate in the low single digits than on targeting full employment of productive resources,” wrote Dr. Muhkisa Kituyi, secretary-general of UNCTAD, in an introduction to the report.

“Given the relatively weak private sector in many LDCs, it is more likely and realistic that in the short to medium term, the investment push required to kick-start the growth process will originate in the public sector.”

To pay for increased outlays, governments should raise taxes on high-income companies and individuals, introduce value added taxes (VAT) on luxury consumption and “refrain from tariff cuts until alternative sources of revenue are put in place.”

Under these guidelines, the game of attracting investment would no longer be a race to the bottom.

The Big and Small

Employment in LDCs tends to be concentrated at two extremes: either in informal small and micro enterprises or in huge capital-intensive export industries.

At one end are businesses consisting of no more than a family or even one young person. At the other, commodity prices, which the International Monetary Fund expects to steadily drop in coming years, have dictated hiring – and firing.

Missing are the medium-sized enterprises that provide stable jobs in much of the developed world.

Experts agree that building that sector will rely in large part on domesticating value-added industries for primary exports – processing iron instead of simply shipping off ore, for example.

A 2011 law in India – a developing country but not an LDC – aimed to accomplish this by setting a 30-percent export tax on iron ore. By incentivising domestic refining, the price of steel in the country fell, benefiting other local industries.

In Chile, despite its reputation as a free-market paradise, the government has maintained a strong hand in copper production, ensuring jobs in processing and preserving sovereign ownership.

But in LDCs, value added in the manufacturing sector remained flat at 10 percent between 2001 and 2011.

“Countries were unaware of the value of their exports and value added,” Delelegn told IPS. “Information asymmetries indicate the playing field is not equal – the companies have the information.”

But as LDCs gain knowledge and confidence at the bargaining table they are pushing for better terms.

Botswana is one of only three countries to have graduated – in 1994 – from LDC status. Early on, it decided to pass laws that created floors for local employment and domestic enterprise in the diamond industry.

“Botswana increased the employment intensity of the diamond sector, which assisted them to capture more of the value gained locally – they were cutting, polishing, processing,” said Yao Graham, coordinator of the Third World Network, which helps facilitate Africa Mining Vision, a Pan-African mining framework that several countries have already adopted.

“For the past 20-30 years, African governments have… prioritised getting a share of the revenue of mining, through the exclusion of everything else,” Graham told IPS. “The World Bank famously summarised it in its Strategy for African Mining for 1992 when it said that African governments should not be interested in employment or control of the minerals.”

“I think the mining boom of the past decade underlined very clearly, actually, that this was a very flawed strategy.”

Disappointing local employment has given other African countries the green light to renegotiate revenue-sharing with companies and implement tax schemes that retain jobs and capital.

Ghana is looking to incorporate policies similar to Botswana’s into its domestic gold industry, which last year topped five billion dollars.

And in Namibia, the government has set up a national mining company, hoping to replicate Chile’s CODELCO and not the bloated state-run enterprises of post-independence Africa.

Varying models

The problem is more complicated in textile-exporting countries like Bangladesh, where policy recommendations centre on more nebulous “technical advancement.”

If Chile is a model for mineral exporters, garment producers look to Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore, all of which began by manufacturing textiles before graduating to more complicated consumer goods and electronics.

But countries worry they may have already missed the boat and it remains to be seen if low wages in LDCs can make up for a lack of expertise.

Ensuring sustainable, value-additive employment would help LDCs become less reliant on foreign aid, which can fluctuate with the global economy.

Studies have shown Official Direct Assistant (ODA) is “five times more volatile than GDP and three times as volatile as exports” and tends to potentiate upturns and recessions.

“Any instability will disrupt aid flows and flows of remittances from migrant workers,” said Delegn.

Countries are beginning to understand that the one-size-fits-all recommendations of the past simply don’t hold water anymore.

“During the Asian financial crisis, the only country that mitigated the negative impact of the crisis was Malaysia, which had put in place policies and strategies that effectively controlled free flow of capital,” said Delegn.

The mea culpas are slow in coming.

In 2011, the IMF quietly admitted in a paper that capital controls had their place.

But for LDCs, a more powerful realisation may be that they don’t need an IMF admission at all.

The G77+China group of 133 developing countries negotiating a new international deal at COP19 in Warsaw to combat climate change walked out of the talks in the wee hours of Wednesday morning to protest developed countries’ reluctance to commit to loss and damage.

“Today at 4 a.m. the delegation of Bolivia and all delegations of G77 walked out because we do not see a clear cut commitment by developed countries to reach an agreement,” said Bolivian negotiator Rene Orellana speaking on Wednesday morning at the COP19 climate summit.

What seems to have happened at the closed night-time session of the so-called contact group of loss and damage is that Juan Hoffmaister, the Bolivian negotiator on loss and damage, who was representing the entire G77 + China group, walked out in the name of developing countries. The walk-out has a strong symbolic value and is unprecedented in the last decade of climate talks.

Orellana further explained that the walk-out was sparked by the attitude of developed countries, among them Norway, which proposed that loss and damage be discussed not under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as developing countries requested but under the looser Rio+20 sustainable development framework.

“G77 put forward a very constructive proposal on loss and damage and have been engaging meaningfully with all countries, but [during the loss and damage session taking place into the early hours of Nov. 20], Australians were behaving like high school boys in class, their behaviour was rude and disrespectful,” commented Harjeet Singh from the NGO ActionAid International on Wednesday.

“On top of that, in the middle of the night, Norway came up with a proposal whereby they rejected everything, they rejected discussing socioeconomic losses, non-economic losses, rehabilitation, compensation,” added Singh. “But these are the crucial elements of loss and damage; if you do not discuss these, how can you discuss loss and damage?”

Developing countries negotiating at COP19 have repeatedly stated that creating an international mechanism under UNFCCC to address loss and damage is the biggest expectation they have of the Warsaw meeting.

G77+China last week proposed a text meant to provide the basis of negotiations for creating such an international mechanism for loss and damage, which called for this issue to be treated as a third, separate, pillar in the UNFCCC process, in addition to mitigation and adaptation.

The super-typhoon Haiyan which hit the Philippines right before COP19 started brought even more to the fore the fact that some countries are already suffering the deadly impacts of climate change, having moved into the so-called “post-adaptation” phase. For these countries, assistance to deal with the loss and damage already caused by climate change would be crucial, argued G77+China.

But developed countries have been reluctant to give such a prominent role under UNFCCC to loss and damage.

According to a U.S. document outlining Washington’s negotiating position at COP which was leaked to the media during the first week of the Warsaw meeting, accepting loss and damage as a third pillar would mean “focusing on blame and liability”. That is, developed countries would have to accept historical responsibility for emissions causing climate change and commit to paying the price.

Australia and Norway appear to have carried this reluctance towards loss and damage into the midnight session.

Speaking on Wednesday, UK negotiator Ed Davey confirmed his country’s support for the developed countries’ resistance. Davey said, “We do not accept the argument on compensation. I don’t think the compensation analysis is fair and sensible, but that does not mean we are not committed to helping the poorest countries adapt.”

EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard stated that it was concerning that developing countries took such a tough stance and made an appeal for countries not to backtrack on talks.

While the walk-out makes developing countries vulnerable to the accusation of being responsible for holding back the Warsaw negotiations, developing countries and NGOs are pointing out that it was the attitude and behaviour of developed countries that forced them to issue such an ultimatum in the first place.

“We are very disappointed by the slow process on negotiations on loss and damage, the most important measure of success here in Warsaw,” said Philippines negotiator Yeb Sano on Wednesday.

“The walk-out happened because a very strong proposal for a loss and damage mechanism put forward by G77 and China did not receive enough traction,” explained Meena Raman from the NGO Third World Network. “This is a postponing tactic by developed countries in order not to make a decision on loss and damage here in Warsaw.”

Since COP19 began on Nov. 11, developed countries have given few signs of being committed to a meaningful international climate deal.

This week, Japan announced that it would cut a previous commitment of reducing CO2 emissions by 25 percent by 2020 to a three percent cut only. Australia recently announced an intention to scrap an existing carbon tax, while Canada indicated it might not meet a pledge to reduce emissions made at the Copenhagen 2009 COP.

Developing countries have indicated that they are ready to discuss more if developed countries take a more serious stance. As an example, Indian Minister of Environment Jayanthi Natarajan declared Wednesday upon arrival in Warsaw that her country would be open to temporarily using the existing Green Climate Fund for doing immediate disbursements for loss and damage, until a proper international mechanism is set in place.

High glaciers such as this one in the Tian Shan mountains in Kazakhstan are said to be safe from global warming. But talk of agreements to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases that cause global warming appears to be fading at COP, replaced by proposals to turn to the private sector for loans to support adaptation to climate change. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS.

By Mantoe Phakathi
WARSAW, Nov 15 2013 (IPS)

As deliberations continue in earnest at the 19th United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Warsaw, negotiators from the Global South welcome a focus on financing adaptation – but reject a new emphasis on a role for the private sector.

Climate negotiations have now dragged on for almost 20 years. Talk of “fair, ambitious and binding” agreements to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases that cause global warming appears to be fading, to be replaced by proposals to turn to the private sector for loans and investment to support adaptation to climate change at what has been dubbed the “Corporate COP  (Conference of Parties)”.

Tosi Mpamu-Mpamu, a negotiator for the Democratic Republic of Congo and a former chair of the African Group of negotiators, sees an alarming change emerging in the approach to funding the response to climate change.

At the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009, developed states pledged 30 billion dollars of new aid for climate finance for the developing world between 2010 and 2012, and a further 100 billion by 2020.

“Developed countries are now shifting the responsibility to provide funding to the private sector, a dangerous trend to these negotiations,” said Mpamu-Mpamu.

Other negotiators share Mpamu-Mpamu’s concerns over the role transnational corporations are assuming at the conference.

“At a three-day conference prior to this COP, businesses spent two days explaining how they could make money out of climate change,” said Rene Orellana, head of Bolivia’s delegation.

And, said Pascone Sabido from the Corporate Europe Observatory, the corporations assuming prominence at the COP are also the biggest emitters of carbon. He criticised the U.N. for accepting sponsorship for COP19 from major polluters like steel giant ArcelorMittal and the Polish Energy Group (PGE), saying these companies were influencing the negotiations.

“You wouldn’t ask Marlboro to sponsor a summit on lung cancer, so why is it acceptable for the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change?” he said.

Rachel Tansey, a freelance writer and researcher on environmental and economic justice issues, says big business wants to see climate finance – public funding – directed towards projects that corporations can profit from. And the governments of the developed countries are listening.

“[Transport and energy giant] Alstom is lobbying for so-called “clean” coal, controversial technologies that allow them to continue profiting from burning fossil fuels, like carbon capture and storage, and for more nuclear power,” said Tansey.

But COP19 president Marcin Kolorec said there was nothing wrong with inviting the private sector to participate in parallel meetings at the conference. He said industries have been given a chance to take part in the same way that non-governmental organisations are, adding that such dialogues have been a feature of the talks since the COPs started.

“We have to be transparent and inclusive,” he told reporters, adding that the Warsaw talks were a build-up to a possible global agreement in 2015 in the French capital, Paris.

He said industries were given a chance to participate at the COP just like non-governmental organisations, adding that such dialogues have been part of the COP since it started.

He said there is no chance that industry will influence COP decisions because they are not part of the formal negotiations.

Swaziland’s Emmanuel Dlamini, the chair of the Africa Group of negotiators, said that despite some risks, bringing business on board is not such a bad idea.

“For developed states to come up with the finance, they need to mobilise the business sector,” Dlamini told IPS.

He echoed the COP president in underlining that business is not taking part in the actual negotiations. “But,” he said, “there is the danger of the private sector influencing decisions through proposals they sell to their governments which could be brought into the COP negotiations.”

For Dlamini, the main challenge is to clearly define climate finance. Since the Copenhagen conference, he said, a lot of aid to developing countries has been classified as climate assistance.

“Yes, there has been money flowing, but to what extent is it climate finance?” wondered Dlamini.

In Swaziland, for instance, he said, money coming from the European Union’s Official Development Assistance for poverty alleviation is now considered climate finance.

“We need a reliable fund for climate change like the GCF,” said Dlamini.

Meena Raman, from the observer group Third World Network, says completing the setting up of the Green Climate Fund would be helpful because it is a grant fund that will directly benefit poor countries. Presently headquartered in South Korea, with operational funding of just seven million dollars, the Green Climate Fund does not as yet have a cent for projects.

“That’s where developing countries are saying the 100 billion dollars should go to, a matter still under discussion,” said Raman.

A lack of education and training condemn many street children in Bangladesh (and many other countries) to a life of poverty. Few are able to escape the cycle of low wages for unskilled work. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 16 2013 (IPS)

With the richest one percent of the population now owning 40 percent of global assets, and the bottom half sharing just one percent, inequality is fast being recognised as a stubborn underlying obstacle to development.

In recent decades, despite steady economic growth, inequality has risen in most countries and in nearly every region of the world. It takes various forms, from income gaps to unequal political access. And it originates in a variety of factors, such as gender, ethnicity, disability, legal status, caste, skin colour, language and economic status.

Yoke Ling Chee of the Penang-based Third World Network (TWN) told IPS that the problem is worsening not only within the richest industrialised countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), but also some developing countries with rapid economic growth.

Continuing structural inequities and flaws in the global trade and financial systems are a major cause, she said.

“The highly inadequate regulatory [and] policy responses to the last rounds of financial crises means that systemic weaknesses continue which make countries vulnerable to more financial instability,” she said.

Chee also said developing countries that have put in place financial reforms but are export-dependent found themselves equally vulnerable in the 2008 crisis and workers in export sectors suffered as a result.

According to a statement in May by a group of 17 U.N. human rights experts, inequality often triggers social problems that further marginalise groups already left behind and neglected, while unequal access to wealth allows runaway resource use by the wealthy, leading to environmental degradation and climate change, whose impacts fall disproportionately on the most vulnerable.

The group of U.N. experts pointed out that the rise in inequality has severely undermined the hard-won achievements of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). It called for a post-2015 economic agenda that will include both a stand-alone and cross-cutting goals to eliminate inequalities.

An Open Working Group (OPW) of U.N. member states is scheduled to meet May 22-24, 2014 to discuss the contours of the proposed new set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGS) which will succeed the current MDGs, whose target date is 2015.

The experts say making equality a cross‑cutting priority would mean every new goal will confront head-on the systemic injustices that drive inequalities – from institutional discrimination against minority groups to uneven investments in social services in different regions of a country.

They singled out social protection as “an indispensable part of the policy toolkit for tackling inequalities, to ensure that the post‑2015 agenda leaves no group, community or region behind.”

As many as 80 percent of families today have no access to social protection, despite clear evidence that social protection systems can contribute significantly to reducing poverty, creating social cohesion, realising human rights and protecting people from shocks such as food price spikes, the experts say.

They also say the post‑2015 agenda should be linked to the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) recommendation on social protection floors, which will help create a funding mechanism for developing countries.

The group includes Verene Sheperd, Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent; Alfred de Zayas, independent expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order; Magdalena Sepulveda, Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights; and Olivier De Schutter, Special Rapporteur on the right to food.

In an op-ed in the New York Times early this week, Joseph Stiglitz, the 2001 Nobel Prize winning economist, said it is well-known by now that income and wealth inequality in most rich countries, especially the United States, have soared in recent decades and, tragically, worsened even more since the Great Recession.

But what about the rest of the world? he asked. Is the gap between countries narrowing, as rising economic powers like China and India have lifted hundreds of millions of people from poverty? And within poor and middle-income countries, is inequality getting worse or better?

Roberto Bissio, director of Social Watch, told IPS the World Bank has also claimed that Goal One of the MDGs – reducing by half the proportion of people in extreme poverty – was met in 2010, five years in advance of the 2015 deadline. Yet that optimistic statistical conclusion in fact hides much more complex realities, he said.

Between 1990 (which is the starting date of Goal One) and 2010 total world exports multiplied almost five times, growing from a total value of 781 billion dollars in 1990 to 3.7 trillion dollars in 2010.

Over the same period, the world’s average inhabitant more than doubled his or her income: from 4,080 dollars a year in 1990 to 9,120 dollars in 2010. Yet that growth in trade and wealth is not reflected with a similar momentum in the evolution of social indicators.

TWN’s Chee told IPS a significant degree of investment profits and value‑added continue to be taken out of developing countries. Those countries that are food commodities exporters now face speculation as an added vulnerability.

Countries that depend on mining controlled by transnational corporations (TNCs) are characterised by environmental destruction, social problems and regressive tax structures for those industries.

“All these contribute to inequalities,” she argued.

“The austerity policies that many European governments now impose on their society that impact on the lower income, even the middle income, are a repeat of what developing countries have been suffering under conditionalities imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for decades,” Chee said.

Civil society organisations warn that if agriculture becomes part of a carbon market, it will spur more land grabbing in Africa. Credit: Patrick Burnett/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Jun 12 2013 (IPS)

U.N. climate talks have largely stalled with the suspension of one of three negotiating tracks at a key mid-year session in Bonn, Germany.

Meanwhile, civil society organisations claim the controversial issue of “carbon farming” has been pushed back onto the agenda after African nations objected to the use of their lands to absorb carbon emissions."There is a profound danger to agriculture here, with real potential for more land grabbing and expansion of monocultures in order to harvest credits." -- Helena Paul of EcoNexus

At the Bonn Climate Change Conference this week, Russia insisted on new procedural rules. That blocked all activity in one track of negotiations called the “Subsidiary Body for Implementation” (SBI). The SBI is a technical body that was supposed to discuss finance to help developing countries cope with climate change, as well as proposals for “loss and damage” to compensate countries for damages.

The SBI talks were suspended Wednesday.

“This development is unfortunate,” said Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Figueres also said the two-week Bonn conference, which ends Friday, had made considerable progress in the two other tracks. A complex new global climate treaty is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2015 with the goal of keeping global warming to less than two degrees C.

“Governments need to look up from their legal and procedural tricks and focus on the planetary emergency that is hitting Africa first and hardest,” said Mithika Mwenda of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA), an African-wide climate movement with over 300 organisations in 45 countries.

And where there is “progress” at the climate talks it is in the wrong direction, according to civil society.

“We’ve seen many governments in Bonn call for a review of the current failed carbon markets to see what went wrong, why they haven’t actually reduced emissions and why they haven’t raised finance on a significant scale,” said Kate Dooley, a consultant on market mechanisms to the Third World Network.

“If we don’t learn these lessons we’ll be doomed to repeat these environmentally and financially risky schemes, at the cost of real action to reduce emissions,” Dooley said in a statement.

In Bonn, two key African negotiators appear to be pushing the World Bank agenda rather than their national interests, civil society organisations claim. Those negotiators are also working for organisations receiving World Bank funding.

One appears to want African nations’ mitigation actions to be based on agriculture, they said.

The World Bank and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation and other organisations favour what they call “climate smart” agriculture. This is defined as forms of farming that are sustainable, increase productivity and with a focus on soaking up carbon from the atmosphere.

African environment ministers from 54 nations recently stated they were not obligated to use their lands to mitigate carbon emissions since Africa is not responsible for climate change. They also instructed African negotiators at the Bonn climate talks to focus on helping African agriculture adapt to a changing climate.

“Are these people serving two masters?” asked Mariam Mayet of the Africa Centre for Biosafety, which works to protect farmers’ rights and biodiversity across the continent.

“What is the World Bank’s level of influence over these individuals, and is there a risk that this is impacting on their actions and the outcome here?” Mayet told IPS.

In December 2011, more than 100 African and international civil society organisations sent a joint letter to African ministers asking for “no soil carbon markets in Africa”.

Globally, agriculture is a major source of global warming gases like carbon and methane – directly accounting for 15 percent to 30 percent of global emissions. Changes in agricultural practices such as reducing or eliminating plowing and fertiliser use can greatly reduce emissions.

Agriculture can also be used to absorb or trap carbon in the soil. When a plant grows, it takes CO2 out the atmosphere and releases oxygen. The more of a crop – maize, soy or vegetable – that remains after harvest, the more carbon is returned to the soil.

Civil society organisations warn that if agriculture becomes part of a carbon market, it will spur more land grabbing in Africa, with woodlands being used mainly for carbon sequestration instead of food production.

“There is a profound danger to agriculture here, with real potential for more land grabbing and expansion of monocultures in order to harvest credits,” Helena Paul of EcoNexus, an environmental NGO, previously told IPS.

Soils are extraordinarily variable and different climatic regimes affect how they function, said Ólafur Arnalds, a soil scientist at the Agricultural University of Iceland. While soils are a key part of the planet’s carbon cycle, we don’t know enough about soil carbon, Arnalds told IPS at a recent Soil Carbon Sequestration conference in Iceland.

That complexity does not suit carbon markets well and drives up costs of accounting and verification. However, Arnalds does believe that soils and agriculture have an important role in climate change and farmers should be compensated for their efforts.

Mining tar sands oil in Canada. Credit: Chris Arsenault/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Apr 28 2013 (IPS)

Nearly 70 percent of known reserves of oil, gas and coal must remain in the ground to avoid dangerous climate change. So why did the energy industry spend 674 billion dollars in 2012 looking for more?

A moratorium on investments new fossil fuel infrastructure is the obvious thing to do about this, said Asad Rehman, head of international climate at Friends of the Earth in the UK."It's bipolar…there is a complete lack of leadership." -- UCS's Alden Meyer

The United Nations is the place to get countries to begin a serious conversation about imposing such a moratorium starting Monday in Bonn, Germany, Rehman told IPS.

The 195 parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are meeting next week in Bonn on a new climate treaty that would go into force in 2020 and discuss ways reduce emissions from fossil fuels prior to 2020.

The World Bank, International Energy Agency and a new report from economist Lord Nicholas Stern all say that close to 70 percent of known reserves of fossil fuels are “unburnable” to have a chance of global warming staying below two degrees C.

The global average temperature has already risen 0.8C, leading to the loss of most of the sea ice in the Arctic, extreme weather events around the world, rising sea levels and oceans that are 30 percent more acidic.

The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere will likely hit 400 parts per million (ppm) this May. That will be the first time in at least three million years.

All nations have agreed under the UNFCCC to keep temperatures below two degrees C, which is by no means a safe level of warming. However, scientists say we are on a path to at least three degrees C, which will trigger irreversible feedbacks leading to much higher temperatures and far worse impacts.

“It’s illogical to be making new investments in fossil fuel infrastructure,” Rehmand said.

The Carbon Tracker agrees. It’s a thinktank whose supporters include the big banks, Standard and Poor’s and the International Energy Agency. It co-authored the “Unburnable Carbon 2013” report with Lord Stern.

The Carbon Tracker says investments in fossil fuel are foolish and continuing them will inevitably crash the global economy because countries will be forced to severely limit how much fossil fuel is burned.

“The scale of ‘listed’ unburnable carbon revealed in this report is astonishing,” said Paul Spedding, an oil and gas analyst at HSBC.

“This report makes it clear that ‘business as usual’ is not a viable option for the fossil fuel industry in the long term,” Speeding said in statement.

While banks and investors are finally waking up to the carbon-climate problem, countries have struggled for two decades under the UNFCCC to construct a global treaty to reduce carbon emissions enough to stay below two degrees C. Perversely, those same countries are pumping 1.9 trillion of their taxpayer’s money each year into subsidising the fossil fuel industry, reported the International Monetary Fund last month. (1.9. trillion seconds is about 60,000 years.)

Countries have promised to reduce these subsidies for the world’s richest industry, but few have acted.

“It’s bipolar…there is a complete lack of leadership,” said Alden Meyer, Union of Concerned Scientists’ director of strategy and policy.

The result is that global carbon emissions rise ever higher each year when they need to begin to decline. The gap between where we are and where we need to go is getting wider every year, Meyer said at a press conference last week.

The UNFCCC meeting in Bonn Apr. 29 to May 3 is one of several weeks of meetings before the annual Convention of the Parties (COP 19) negotiations in Poland this November. The main issues, as always, will be deciding how big the emissions cuts will be, the timing of those cuts and what the contribution should be for each country.

“There are two things to tackle in Bonn: how developed countries fulfill their promises to cut emissions deep and meet their financial commitments to enable developing countries to address climate change now,” said Meena Raman, negotiation expert at the Third World Network.

Developed countries and blocs like the U.S., Canada and the European Union do not appear ready to increase their promised emission cuts even though they are insufficient to achieve the two-degree C target and are collectively less than those from developing countries, as previously reported by IPS.

China is now the world’s biggest carbon emitter but it will be many years yet before the carbon molecules in the atmosphere with little Chinese flags on them will match those with U.S. flags. Since CO2 resides in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, emissions of 50 years ago have the same impact on the climate as those emitted today.

“It’s not hard to figure out the total amount of CO2 from the U.S. and other developed countries already in the atmosphere,” said Sivan Kartha, Senior Scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute’s US Center.

“Taking responsibility for the mess you made is a widely-accepted principle,” Kartha told IPS.

This politically thorny issue is known as “historical emissions” and it pits the South against the North. More recently, countries in the North have been pushing the concept of “mitigation potential” suggesting that it is harder for the U.S. to reduce carbon emissions because of existing infrastructure than it is for poor countries like India who haven’t built them yet, he said.

While “moratorium” will only be whispered about, “equity” will be the buzzword in play in Bonn this week, Kartha said.

Positive developments on climate are largely found outside the UNFCCC process. China and the U.S. recently signed a landmark agreement on climate and clean energy. Both countries agreed climate change poses a serious risk and have agreed to take a global leadership position, said Alden Myer.

“I take this a very positive sign,” but it remains to be seen if this translates into action, Meyer said.