Bonn Blog
Tom Sharman, ActionAid's Climate Justice Coordinator is in Bonn for the UN climate change negotiations from June 1st - 12th
12th June 2009
Bonn Climate Talks: ActionAid's Verdict
Is a just global climate deal still possible after 12 days of talking in Bonn? The answer is yes: we still have 177 days left before Copenhagen so it can be done. But let’s be crystal clear: the world is not on track to reach a decent agreement in December.
In ActionAid’s
press release today I said that we needed a ‘political earthquake’ to get us on track. What I mean is that we need a sudden and dramatic shift, a change in ambition and approach from the rich world’s politicians, if the
climate summit in Copenhagen is to be successful.
The
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change called for rich countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by between 25% and 40% by 2020, against 1990 levels, to have a better than even chance of limiting global warming to below 2 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels.
Many scientists now say that 40%+ targets are required and the small islands who are on the front-line of climate impacts have
called for 45% cuts from rich countries.
The EU have a 20% target, rising to 30% if others do more; Japan announced an 8% target and Australia’s target is 4% rising to 24% if developing countries take action. The US, and most other rich countries, have so far failed to present any target at all.
The story is no better for adaptation.
The industrialised world is failing to address the most urgent needs of those on the front-line of climate impacts. The will to find the US$86 billion a year of new money of new money needed to enable vulnerable people to adapt and the creation of a new institution to disburse it fairly is nowhere to be seen.
If there’s no change then there’s no chance of the deal in Copenhagen that will safeguard the livelihoods of all of the world’s people for both today and tomorrow.
10th June 2009
Japan stuns world with pathetic climate target
There are essentially two sides of the climate change coin: adaptation – because the climate has already changed and poor countries are feeling the heat, and mitigation – because most of us want to leave behind a planet that our children can live in. Both are vital components of a new global deal.
Today Japan became the latest of the world’s richest countries to announce a greenhouse gas emissions target for 2020.
After a big fight in Bali in 2007 and an
emotional appeal by UN climate chief Yvo do Boer those numbers made it into the
Bali Action Plan that forms the basis for these UN climate change negotiations.
So it is extremely disturbing to see that only Norway (with 30%) has committed to a target within that range. The EU has a unilateral target of 20% which it says it will increase to 30% if other countries commit to doing the same.
But so far the offers have come in at 5% from Australia (it will increase this to 25% if developing countries commit to specific cuts) and 3% from the US (if the Climate Bill passes through Congress).
Japan’s target is a 15% cut by 2020 but against 2005 levels rather than the accepted baseline of 1990.
Against 1990 levels this equates to a cut of only 8%. However, Japan is already committed to a 6% cut on 1990 levels by 2012 under the
Kyoto Protocol
So this means that the new target is only 2% more. And because that 2% is to be achieved between 2012 and 2020 than works out as an annual reduction of only 0.25%.
If Japan is allowed to get away with this then the prospects of a decent global deal in Copenhagen look remote.
9th June 2009
Food for thought
For all the talk in Bonn about finding new sources of money to tackle climate change and new institutions to spend it (both of which are important by the way), very little attention has been given to who, precisely, should receive the cash.
The first draft of the
Copenhagen negotiating text mentioned both vulnerable countries - such as Least Developed Countries and small islands - and vulnerable communities and groups – such as women, children, and old and indigenous people. But there was no mention of the occupation that makes many of these people so vulnerable to climate risk.
An awful lot of these farmers rely on rain, rather than irrigation, to grow their crops. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that yields from rain-fed farming in some African countries could
fall by up to 50% by 2020. – that’s only 11 years away.
So by any calculation smallholder farmers are susceptible to climate change. And if they are, then so are the people who eat the food they produce.
When the
UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was agreed in 1992 the countries who signed up (almost everyone) recognised the problem: one of its objectives is; “to ensure that food production is not threatened”. But 17 years later the focus on food and those who produce it seems to have been lost.
There’s still time to ensure that a good deal of the money to tackle climate change (if and when it arrives) is used to help smallholder farmers adapt.
The best way it can do this is to help them to practice ‘sustainable agriculture’: enhancing water storage facilities, diversifying production, building community self-sufficiency through the use of collective stocks such as seed banks, prioritising organic production and recognising the limitations and opportunities of the local environment.
But time is ticking and it would be a grave injustice if after all the important work on finding the money and building the right institutions, the world failed to spend it on the right people.
8th June 2009
A fight to the eco-finish?
One of the interesting things about the Bonn climate change negotiations is that they are not the only talks in town: what happens elsewhere has a huge bearing on the progress towards a new global deal.
These include the
Major Economies Forum (MEF) known as the Major Economies Meeting (MEM) under George Bush but rebranded by Barack Obama. The world’s 17 current biggest emitters of greenhouse gases (by country total not per person) have regular meetings to see if differences can be bridged (they usually can’t) and are due to have a big shindig on the sidelines of the G8 summit in Italy in July.
There are also a series of regional get-togethers in the run-up to Copenhagen. The European Union’s are some of the most important, partly because their members speak as one in the international climate talks, and partly because they have historically been the most progressive of the rich country blocs on the global stage.
So tomorrow (9th June) it is the turn of European Finance Ministers (the meeting is known as
Ecofin) to try to help improve the chances of a decent Copenhagen Agreement.
The signs are not good: it looks like there might not even be ‘Council conclusions’ on climate change – a sure sign of fisticuffs or blood on the carpet. Arguments are raging about whether Europe should cough up its
fair share of the climate cash and whether the EU should support some of the innovative ideas to raise the money.
But with most European countries in recession, a German general election in October and a general reluctance to spend money on anything but bank bailouts, it looks like Europe’s politicians will miss their chance to shine. And with that our chance to reach a successful outcome in Copenhagen looks
less and less likely
5th June 2005
India and China oppose global climate taxes
Who should pay to tackle climate change in developing countries?
Well there’s pretty much universal agreement that the rich world ought to pay poor countries something but no consensus on
how much , where the money should come from, or who should control
how it’s spent
Finance is often seen as the key to agreement in Copenhagen and, more broadly, essential to contain the climate crisis. Today governments gave their first comments on the finance chapter of the draft negotiating text – and huge divisions were evident.
Perhaps most surprisingly, both India and China opposed all so-called
‘innovative’ funding sources: the auctioning of pollution permits, a global carbon tax, international taxes on aviation and shipping and a currency transaction tax.
Their argument, and they do have a point, is that funding should be provided by rich countries. Global taxes necessarily involve developing countries and are therefore contrary to the
UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in the eyes of India and China, which say that rich countries will provide ‘new and additional financial resources’ to developing countries.
However, China and India’s alternative is that rich countries give developing countries between 0.5-2% of their GDP. All well and good but rich countries agreed to give poor countries 0.7% of their GDP as aid back in 1970 and only a handful (UK not included) have
so far delivered on that commitment.
So without some sort of automatic mechanism it is difficult to see how the estimated US$180 billion a year that developing countries need will ever materialise.
India and China should think about that carefully.
4th June 2009
Bolivia urges rich world to repay its ‘climate debt’
Most people will know that the rich world bears the greatest responsibility for causing climate change. Although China is currently the world’s biggest emitting country it has more than a billion people so its per person emissions are still low. And it has only been polluting for a few decades – against a track record of more than 200 years for countries like Britain!
But what does ‘historical responsibility’ mean in practice?
Bolivia has done more than anyone else to work out what’s required and has elaborated an easy-to-grasp, yet sophisticated concept of ‘climate debt.’
‘Climate debt’ consists of two components: ‘emissions debt’ and ‘adaptation debt.’
Rich countries have amassed an emissions debt through their excessive consumption of the limited atmospheric space: they have left almost no space for developing countries to increase their greenhouse gas emissions (and there is no example to date of a poor country that has developed without increasing their emissions).
Repayment of that debt requires them to make deeper emissions cuts than those they are currently considering so that developing countries have some space to grow their emissions, without destroying the planet.
But rich countries have also contributed disproportionately to the impacts of climate change being felt by developing countries because of their emissions.
They have therefore run up an ‘adaptation debt’ which can be repaid only by providing substantial financial resources to enable developing countries to adapt.
If governments are serious about a just solution to the climate crisis then they should get behind Bolivia’s ideas and start repaying their climate debts.
3rd June 2009
US double-counting leaves developing countries short of cash
When does climate cash become real money? Well most countries would say that it needs to be money they can actually spend.
And, for those hit hardest by climate change, that means spending it on measures to adapt to global warming – like helping smallholder farmers to better conserve water or grow different kinds of crops.
But for the US, climate cash is all about talking up your generosity while spending most of the money on yourself.
The US Climate Change Bill currently going through Congress is designed to cut US emissions by 17% against 2005 levels (which is about a 3% cut on 1990 levels) by 2020.
But it also allows emissions reductions outside the US to count towards that total, provided the US has paid for them.
So the US’s domestic emission reductions could be a lot lower than a 17% cut.
But if you already feel that this is cheating – a case of the US outsourcing its obligations – then wait until you hear the next part of the argument the US has been making in Bonn.
The money the US is effectively spending on itself – to count towards its mitigation target – is also being touted as its financial contribution to developing countries.
The US delegation suggests the figure is much lower – about US$10 billion – but says that almost all of this money comes from… the money it spends on offsets.
So the US isn’t actually planning to give developing countries anything like the US$10 billion a year it says is its fair share. And its hard to see how any of this can really be seen as adaptation funding given that’s purpose is to cut emissions rather than deal with the degree of climate change that is now inevitable.
It’s certainly a creative piece of accounting but it’s hard to see why developing countries should buy it.
2nd June 2009
Saudis demand cash for an end to the oil era
Conventional wisdom says that
those worst affected – small islands, the poorest countries and Africa – should receive funds from those who’ve done most of the damage – rich, industrialised countries.
But Saudi Arabia has consistently turned conventional wisdom on its head.
In a discussion on establishing a fund for those countries so badly affected by climate change that no amount of adaptation is possible (think small islands disappearing under rising sea levels), the world’s biggest oil producer said that it was also a worthy recipient of compensation – because of the damage to its economy wrought by the end of the fossil fuel era.
The Saudis make this argument – that they deserve climate money – whenever they get the chance: they need help to ‘adapt’ to a world in which they can no longer sell so much oil (presumably a world in which the West drives electric cars or gets around on bicycles).
This nonsense got Saudi Arabia an NGO
‘fossil of the day’ – awarded to those countries who block progress at the UN climate change negotiations. Unfortunately it shows that not every government here in Bonn wants to do something positive about climate change.
1st June 2009
Global climate deal: everything still to play for
What will a new global deal on climate change look like? Well, with
less than 200 days to go before it’s due to be signed in Copenhagen we now at least have some answers.
Governments from around the world will now spend the next two weeks arguing about what should stay in and what should be cut. And then more arguing is expected in Bangkok (Thailand) in September and in Barcelona (Spain) in November before the big Copenhagen meeting in December where the arguing will have to come to an end if the climate crisis is to be tackled.
We can now safely say that the deal will require rich countries to make total greenhouse gas emission cuts of 45% by 2020 (against 1990 levels) if the small island developing countries get their way. Or 30% if the EU get their way.
Or a lot less if the national targets of Australia (-5% to -25%), Canada (-3%), or the US (-0%) are accepted.
We also know where the money to help vulnerable countries to adapt to climate change will come from: rich countries’ national budgets, or selling pollution permits, or a global carbon tax, or taxes on air travel and shipping, or a currency transaction tax, or by fining rich countries who’ve failed to cut emissions as promised. Or all of the above
So everything is very much to play for. But at least countries have brought some of their favoured toys to play with.
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