december 20, 2014

Staring Down a Precipice

Lima ignored the urgent need to address climate change.

hey came, they talked, and they almost failed. That seems
to be the trajectory of most of the conferences on climate
change held under the auspices of the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The latest,
the 20th Conference of Parties (CoP 20) at Lima, Peru, was not very
different. Over a thousand delegates from 190 countries talked,
argued, bargained, negotiated and finally, after extending the
meeting by a couple of days, came up with a patchwork Lima
Call for Climate Action with which no one was completely satisfied. This document is expected to form the basis for negotiations leading up to the crucial Climate Summit in Paris in 2015
when nations are expected to arrive at a legally binding international treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol that lapsed in 2012.
Why, one wonders, is the same routine repeated when in 2014
the fact that human intervention is responsible for global warming
and climate change has been convincingly established? Fortunately,
in Lima no one wasted time arguing about the science of climate
change. Yet they continued to debate about who should shoulder
the principal responsibility for curbing greenhouse gases (GHGs)
and how adaptation measures could be financed. When the Kyoto
Protocol was negotiated and agreed upon in 1997, few disputed that
the older industrialised nations had to bear the primary responsibility. The world was cleaved into two halves developed and developing. The former had to curb emissions while the latter were to be
helped to adopt cleaner technologies and adapt to climate change.
Almost two decades later, the picture has changed. China,
defined as developing in 1997, is now the worlds largest emitter
of GHG. It has exceeded the US and the European Union. Although
India stands at number four in the list of the six largest emitters of
GHGs, its total emissions are less than a quarter of Chinas. But
more significant than global rankings is the fact that the carbon
budget, a concept that the fourth assessment on climate change
by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) put
forward last year, is precipitously close to being consumed.
The IPCC calculated that the earths atmosphere could absorb
at the most 800-880 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) before
global warming exceeded the 2C mark. The problem is that the
earth has already accumulated 530 gigatonnes of CO2, leaving
only a third of this carbon budget. If the rate of emissions does
not reduce drastically, we are staring at the inevitability of a
climate change precipice where the only direction in which the
earth will go is down. Against this frightening future, squabbling
Economic & Political Weekly

EPW

december 20, 2014

vol xlix no 51

over global ranking is less important than finding constructive

ways to limit the consumption of this carbon budget.
This, in essence, should be the focus of the climate talks.
Ideally, the discussions should be based on science. Inevitably, it
is politics that determines the ultimate outcome. For instance, in
the run-up to Lima, the US and China agreed to limits on their
GHG emissions. This was interpreted as path-breaking by some
and by others as a ploy to put pressure on countries like India to
do the same. China has agreed to peak its emissions by 2030
while the US promises to reduce emissions by 28% of 2005 levels
by 2025. The sceptics point out that these levels are actually lower
than what would have been required under the Kyoto Protocol
and that, in any case, this bilateral agreement is non-binding.
Despite the agreement, which the US and China had clearly
hoped would influence the Lima talks, the outcome was
somewhat different. For one, the final Lima document retains
the hard-fought concept of common but differentiated responsibility (CBDR) that developing countries pushed through postKyoto. They had argued that even if global warming affects
everyone, the industrial economies that have contributed to the
current accumulation of GHGs in the atmosphere should be held
principally responsible for mitigation as well as for funding
adaptation measures in poorer countries.
Despite the efforts by many richer countries to remove this
provision, it survived. However, its meaning has been diluted
with the insertion of a new phrase, the Intended Nationally
Determined Contributions (INDC), that allows individual countries,
irrespective of the extent of their emissions, to determine how
far they are prepared to go. Unlike the Kyoto Protocol, this
provision provides a handy loophole for many countries from
accepting binding commitments to limit emissions.
In the end, however, whether it is CBDR or INDC, these are just
so many words. In the absence of a transparent system for monitoring GHG emissions, a treaty or protocol that has legal force to
compel nations to comply with emission limits, and shared concern
for the most vulnerable countries that are already debilitated by
the fallout of global warming, they carry little meaning. GHGs
know no borders; their accumulation is not constrained by questions of sovereignty; their adverse impacts are not governed by
poverty or wealth. It is unfortunate that a sense of urgency and
commitment to address this global crisis has been missing in
international climate change negotiations.
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