EXPECTATIONS FOR this year’s United Nations climate change conference in Cancún were so low that the fact it ended with an agreement at all is a step forward, particularly after the débacle in Copenhagen last December. It has also bought some time.
Host country Mexico is entitled to put a feather in its cap for working as hard as it did over the past 12 months to ensure a successful conclusion at the 16th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Perhaps more important than the details of what was agreed, the outcome was a small victory for multilateralism and the often cumbersome UN process involving more than 190 countries.
The European Union wanted (and still wants) much more than was achieved in Cancún, notably a legally binding international agreement – a new and tougher version of the 1997 Kyoto Ptotocol. So do most countries in the developing world, as they see this as the only way of locking developed countries into a verifiable regime of emissions cuts. But Japan, Canada and Russia have all made it clear that they are opposed to a renewal of Kyoto without the participation of the US, which declined to ratify the protocol in 2001 under president George W Bush, and China, which wasn’t bound by its terms and has shown no willingness to be so bound in the future. So the issue was fudged in Cancún and will be taken up again in Durban next December.
In the meantime, ministers, diplomats and climate change experts can take some credit for what was agreed in Mexico’s premier tourist resort. This includes the establishment of a Green Climate Fund, which would funnel aid to vulnerable developing countries both for adaptation to the impacts of climate change and promotion of low-carbon technologies, such as solar and wind energy. Agreement was also reached on the so-called REDD programme to compensate developing countries for protecting tropical rainforests, which are significant carbon “sinks” (athough the details have yet to be worked out) and on the sensitive issue of monitoring, reporting and verifying the implementation of pledges by developed countries to cut their emissions as well as actions taken by developing countries.
Nobody should be under any illusion that a comprehensive climate change agreement, dealing with all of the substantive issues, will be reached at the Durban conference or even the one that follows it in 2012. It is going to be a long hard road. The viral growth of scepticism and denial in the US, in particular, and the political complexion of the new Congress compound the difficulties faced by President Obama. Even in Ireland, tackling climate change has moved far down the list of public priorities as incomes plummet and the recession deepens.
The cold spell may have convinced many that global warming isn’t happening at all. However, it is now more than likely that 2010 will turn out to be the hottest year on record, surpassing both 1998 and 2005, according to the data just published by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration. We can only afford to ignore such scientific evidence at our peril.