By Joydeep Gupta, IANS
Bali : Almost a full day after schedule, the seminal UN conference on climate change has come up with a roadmap that satisfies most governments because it is vague on all major issues in the fight against global warming that is already having a huge adverse impact on the world.
Developing countries, led by India at the last moment, are happy to have warded off an attempt by the US to impose legally binding measures on them to control emissions of greenhouses gases (GHG) responsible for global warming, though industrialised countries emit almost all the GHG.
The US government says it fears the Bali roadmap will have an adverse impact on economic development, but it has anyway succeeded in keeping out the most important part of any roadmap – the destination.
The European Union says it is happy to have got the roadmap at all.
The UN juggernaut that brought nearly 11,000 people from 187 countries to this beautiful island will now move on with a whole series of meetings in the next two years, culminating in another conference of parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Copenhagen.
There the parties – as the 190 countries are known in UN parlance – are supposed to sign a treaty to address climate change in the post-2012 world, when the Kyoto Protocol ends its first phase.
What will the parties discuss over the next two years? That is what the Bali roadmap was supposed to show. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has laid out the scenarios on the global warming that will result from each level of action. It is clear in the report that the global emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) that are warming the atmosphere must be halved by 2050, compared to 1990.
To do that, a corollary is that industrialised countries must reduce their GHG emissions 25-40 percent by 2020, compared to 1990.
Yet, when the EU proposed that this 25-40 percent reduction be the destination of the Bali roadmap, the US objected, saying this would prejudge the negotiations to take place over the next two years.
In their eagerness to have the US on board any agreement to address climate change after 2012, the rest of the world has now agreed to drop this reduction range from the Bali roadmap, so it is unclear what the negotiators are supposed to aspire to in the next two years.
Still, the US delegation made an attempt to torpedo any agreement by its sudden insistence that developing countries must also take “actions” to cut GHG emissions.
Neither are developing country emissions anywhere near that of the industrialised countries (per capita emissions in the US are 20 times that of India) nor are they supposed to make any mandatory cuts under the Kyoto Protocol.
So the Indian delegation led by Science and Technology Minister Kapil Sibal quite rightly objected to the US plan in the final plenary session and got the US to back down when even its trusted allies – Canada and Japan – deserted it.
There have been relatively minor successes at the Bali summit, though there are devils in the details of every agreement.
Industrialised countries have agreed to start the adaptation fund to help developing countries fight impacts of climate change, though the fund does not have even one percent of the money required to adapt, and there is no talk of where the rest of the money is to come from.
They have also agreed to help developing countries fight deforestation as part of the fight against climate change, though again, the only thing they have agreed to fund so far are pilot afforestation projects and studies on economic valuations of trees.
Agreement on whether the carbon capture and storage technology (to keep carbon underground) should be helped to develop via funding is also only at the level of studies.
So overall, it’s going to be business as usual, and most government delegations are going home triumphant.
International environment NGOs are among the few not having an end-of-term party.
Greenpeace, a group that has studied the issue closely and has shadowed negotiations for over 15 years, was unhappy. Gerd Leipold, Executive Director of Greenpeace International, said: “The climate agreement finalised in Bali has been stripped of the emission reduction targets that science and humanity demands. The Bush Administration¹s underhand tactics have left the Bali Mandate omitting any reference to the crucial cuts required to stop climate change and relegated the science to a footnote.”
But the group was confident that “mounting public pressure on every continent will force governments over the next two years to agree the inevitable deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions science demands. Germany has already set the example by announcing it would cut its own emissions by 40 percent by 2020”.
Colm O’Cuanachain, team leader in Bali of another international NGO ActionAid, said: “New, additional and sustainable finance must be provided by rich countries to close the multi-billion dollar gap between what is needed and what is currently available to fund adaptation to climate change.”
(Joydeep Gupta can be contacted at [email protected])