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The Copenhagen climate talks were recently interrupted by a dramatic demonstration by the G77 bloc of developing countries' resolve to walk out of the negotiations, in response to the leaked text of the Danish Prime Minister Rasmussen’s “Circle of Commitment” effort.
The Prime Minister of Denmark had been meeting with a small group of world leaders, including from the UK and the United States, and their document that they had been working off of was seen by the developing countries as unfair. The secrecy that this document had been developed in was seen as inappropriate for a consensus based process and inconsistent with the principles of a fair, ambitious, and binding treaty necessary to get the world working together to solve climate change.
In particular, developing country representatives were concerned about the lack of ambition by developed countries in reducing their own emissions, the supplanting of the Kyoto protocol by a new system, and the levels of emission reduction obligations for developing countries. One particular sticking point was the low levels of funding for adaptation funding to protect vulnerable populations from the worst impacts of climate change.
Todd Stern, the lead US negotiator, had said the United States would commit $10 billion dollars over the short-term, less than one-tenth of the over $100 billion dollars a year that the UN’s top climate official, Yvo de Boer, has called for. "If divided by the world population, it is less than $2 per person -- not enough to buy a coffee or a coffin in some of the poor countries suffering floods and droughts as a result of climate change," said Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, chair of the Group of 77 developing countries.
Another hot button issue is the role of the World Bank in climate financing, as it and the Global Environmental Facility, a UN affiliated financing body, are seen as overly bureaucratic and unaccountable by many developing countries.
What this incident demonstrates is that a fair, ambitious, and binding climate treaty is not just the right thing, it is politically necessary. Developing countries, that face the greatest burden of climate impacts, but also are emitting a growing percentage of the world’s greenhouse gases, are essential to a global climate treaty. A deal that isn’t widely seen as fair, with developed countries like the United States, Japan, and Canada living up their historical responsibility for greenhouse emissions, simply won’t be accepted by the global south. This means that a fair deal is essential to get the developing countries, like Brazil, India, and China, that have become major carbon emitters, to agree to act.
Another group of developing countries, the Small Island States and Least Developed Countries, places like the Maldives in the Indian Ocean and Ethiopia, are facing the terrifying consequences of rapidly accelerating climate change. For them, any climate deal that isn’t ambitious enough to protect their homelands is just a “Suicide Pact”, as President Nasheed of the Maldives phrased it.
The truth is that on climate change, what is right and what is necessary are the same. Any attempt to negotiate an agreement that fails to meet the clear lines set by civil society for a fair, ambitious, and binding climate treaty is unlikely to bring the world along with it, for a global problem demanding a global solution.
Finally, this incident could have been avoided through a commitment to transparency and openness in the climate negotiation process. The leaked text was found to have been older, from November 27th, and it is likely the newer text written in the interim would have been less objectionable to the developing country negotiators. If the countries involved, including the US, Denmark, and the UK had published their draft work, journalists and civil society groups would have known the current state of affairs.
For democratic countries like the US, that has recently embraced the idea of a radically more open government, and the Danish Prime Minister, leading one of the top-rated countries by TckTckTck partner Transparency International, abandoning closed door and back-channel negotiating efforts would be a major step forward.
