December 31, 2011 — andyextance

After 60 hours of continuous high-pressure negotiation in Durban, South Africa, earlier this month bleary-eyed politicians agreed on the first steps to a new legal treaty limiting global greenhouse gas emissions. 36 hours after the scheduled close of the talks, the world’s governments decided to adopt a universal legal agreement on climate change by 2015 at the latest. The Kyoto Protocol that has controlled emissions since 2005 was extended another 5-7 years beyond 2012, by governments including 35 of 37 original participating, mainly European, industrialised countries. The rest of the world will have only voluntary limits until 2020, when the deal to be agreed by 2015 will require all countries to reduce emissions.

In one of the most interesting articles I read on these dramatic talks Frank MacDonald, environment editor of the Irish Times, notes that the climate issue has become ever more pressing with each year. He says that after covering the annual December climate “Conference of Parties” (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) for almost all of the 17 years since it started. And 2011 was especially ill-tempered with China and, at the very end of the negotiations in a tense showdown with Europe, India not wanting the 2015 agreement to be “legally binding”. But Brazilian negotiators reportedly devised the wording “protocol, legal instrument or agreed outcome with legal force” that was finally accepted.

The fact that developed countries are responsible for most of the CO2 already in the atmosphere meant that countries like Venezuela protested against being signed up to emissions reductions. However other developing countries, like Brazil and South Africa, were happier to sign up, as they recognise that most future emissions growth will come from nations like them, ultimately leaving India as the only objector. But the arguments on emissions meant that details on other key climate issues gained less attention. For example, the Durban document also did not mention “intellectual property rights”, like patents, that protect new inventions. This is an especially important issue for developing countries, who say patent restrictions restrict green technologies from reaching them as they try and cope with a warming climate and reduce their emissions.

Hard work remains

In particular, talks on how the massive Green Climate Fund is organised made little solid progress beyond deciding it should be overseen by the UN, which developing countries wanted. In November Simon Donner, a geographer at the University of British Columbia, pointed out to Simple Climate, the massive possibility for waste in the $100 billion-per-year effort to help developing countries cope with climate change. One of his key pieces of advice was running the fund with rules that are readily adapted to make sure all the funding is completely new. But negotiations clarified neither where the money was coming from, nor how it will be run.

Nonetheless, the UNFCCC says the “Durban platform” is a breakthrough and as it potentially covers both the world’s largest emitters, US and China, it seems like an important advance to me too. There remains a lot of hard work ahead, starting at 2012’s COP 18 negotiations in Qatar – the country with the highest natural gas exports and greenhouse gas emissions per person. That Canada has pulled out of the Kyoto protocol even as Europe promises to register its existing emissions pledges in an extended version shows the kind of problems that will be faced.

Greenhouse gas emissions reached an all-time high of 9.1 billion tons of carbon in 2010, compared with 8.6 billion tons in 2009. Researchers have also underlined that climate change is not slowing down after removing three main causes of short-term fluctuations in global temperature records. Those causes were the El Niño climate pattern, volcanic eruptions and variations in the Sun’s brightness. After correcting for these, they found that global average temperatures have increased by 0.5°C in the past 30 years. In all of five global temperature data sets, 2009 and 2010 were the two hottest years and when all five data sets are averaged, 2010 was the hottest year on record. In this situation, the ability of the countries of the world to come to an agreement on the way to try and bring it under control should be welcomed. Hopefully our politicians will resolve in 2012 to do their best to turn this agreement into global law, and we should do our best to take advantage of any opportunities we get to encourage and help them to do so.