E3G

The world and climate change: all together now

By Tom Burke

A planetary crisis calls for clear thinking and shared action towards a global deal, says Tom Burke, in an article featured on the new openDemocracy & E3G project Global Deal: the politics of climate change.

The “global” problem of climate change is endlessly discussed, but rarely looked at in a cold light. The crux of the matter is that all of us, everywhere, share this same monumental problem. To prosper we need energy security; but if we persist in using fossil-fuels with current technologies, our prosperity will founder.

The roadmap drawn up at the Bali climate-change convention on 3-14 December 2007 will show what we need to do to establish the post-Kyoto regime. But to get through the ferocious complexity of the process, we will need a change of mindset. Moving away from a focus on who is to blame and who should act first, we must gain a new political maturity.

Four key messages

The political torpor round climate change has left us with policies too weak to stem emissions

This could change with the negotiations in Bali, which it is hoped will culminate in a global deal in Copenhagen in 2009

The negotiations, expected to be hugely complex, will focus on a daunting array of core issues, and highlight divisions between supporters and opponents of the Kyoto protocol

The process will work only if it moves beyond claims to the “moral high ground” towards working out ways of moving together towards a low-carbon economy.

A failure of will

The departing United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan warned in November 2006 of the growing gap between what scientists say is necessary to avoid dangerous climate change and what politicians are willing to do. Since then, concern among climate scientists has grown along with our knowledge of the impacts of a rapidly changing climate.

Furthermore, the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is growing at a faster pace. In November 2007, the International Energy Agency published new projections in its World Energy Outlook. These now forecast a 57% increase in CO2 emissions by 2030, with coal use due to grow by 73% in a “business as usual” scenario.

But the torpor that afflicts the political response to what former United States national-security advisor Sandy Berger calls “the existential problem of climate change” continues. The world’s climate policies, at their current level of ambition, are simply too weak to stem the onrushing tide of emissions.

The window of opportunity to keep the eventual temperature rise below 2 degrees Centigrade - increasingly recognised as the threshold of dangerous climate change - is closing rapidly. It is no exaggeration to say that the fate of the earth and its 6.5 billion citizens largely depends on the success of the United Nations climate-negotiating process being launched in Bali.

The Bali conference is the ultimate in “talks about talks”. Its purpose is not to agree what more should be done to tackle climate change. The political conditions simply do not yet exist for such an agreement. Instead, it will try to agree to launch a negotiating process aimed at reaching such an agreement at the conference of the parties in Copenhagen (COP15) in November-December 2009.

The date for reaching this agreement is important because the first commitment period of the Kyoto protocol ends in 2012. Contrary to much press and political comment - some misinformed, some malign - the protocol does not “expire”. International treaties do not simply disappear.

Without agreement on a second commitment period, or an agreement that replaces the protocol and all its mechanisms completely, the world’s burgeoning carbon markets would collapse. Agreement is needed by 2009 because of the time it will take for it to be ratified by enough governments to come into force before 2012.

The hoped-for outcome from these talks is a Bali roadmap charting the way forward to a “global deal” in two years’ time. Quite what this “global deal” will consist of - and who it will include - remains to be seen. The core elements are now on the table:

further steep cuts in carbon emissions by industrialised countries

more money - much more money - for adaptation and technology-transfer

some kind of quantifiable commitments from developing countries

measures to reduce deforestation.

But it is not at all clear how these elements will fit together.