Nnimmo Bassey
25 July 2008
opinion
Climate Change is accepted today even by die hard sceptics as a real crisis that must be urgently tackled for the preservation of the earth in a form that would sustain human and other life forms. The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the best known body of climate scientists who accepts that most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations due to human activities [1].
It has also been recognised as a human rights issue by the UN. There have been several conferences, studies and multilateral discussions on the issue. There has also been plenty of foot dragging by governments who erroneously think that prodigious carbon emission is a mark of progress and development.
We note that the global North has historically contributed disproportionately to the amounts of greenhouse gasses (GHS) in the atmosphere whereas the global South has been saddled with the impacts and is now being forced into a corner from where she has no option but to seek means for mitigation of the impacts and adapting to them as well. It is instructive as we shall see that the slant of these official frameworks and mechanisms have been intimately tied to trade and have had the main slant of opening up opportunities for huge financial benefits for polluting industries while the South will be further pushed into the debt trap through the strategies of the World Bank and other international financial players.
This paper aims to review governmental frameworks for addressing climate change with an underlying premise that there is an urgent need for the delinking of carbon emission from positive development.
The KYOTO PROTOCOL
The Kyoto protocol will effectively end in the year 2012. The protocol had set very minimal targets for reduction of carbon emissions that was to be achieved between 1990 and 2012. Major emitters such as the USA and Australia did not accept these targets. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and other analysts have shown that even if the targets set by Kyoto were met, the climate crisis would not have been sufficiently tackled.
One of the key failures of the Kyoto protocol is that it did not unambiguously pin the blame for the problem on hydrocarbons. As long as this was the case, the frameworks for handling the problem were fundamentally flawed. Conventional wisdom instructs us to tackle the root causes of problems rather than the symptoms if we wish to radically pursue long lasting solutions.
The Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997 at one of the annual conferences of the parties to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It finally came into force on 16 February 2005, after 127 countries (responsible for 61 per cent of global greenhouse-gas emissions) had ratified it. The Protocol requires that the industrialized nations should reduce their emissions at an average of 5.2 per cent below 1990 levels by 2008-2012.
The delay in adoption of the protocol was largely due to the withdrawal of the USA, the global giant in carbon emission, in 2001. It is instructive to note that before the USA withdrew they had effectively influenced the language of the protocol and firmly planted the bent to carbon mercantilism or "free market" environmentalism. In fact they got the world to accept the market language and concept at the 1997 Kyoto meeting in exchange for USA support that never materialized [2]. The world is still stuck with the mindset of these untested ideas to this day [3]. The protocol was set on a market ideology and this has blocked the pathway to real and just solutions to climate change.
It is useful to note that although The USA has a mere 5% of the world's population she emits nearly 25% of the world's greenhouse gases from the burning of oil, gas, and coal - for driving cars, producing electricity, and running industries. With so much carbon burden, it can be seen that the country would not readily want to accede to emission caps that would help keep the earth's temperature from rising to or above 20 Celsius over pre-industrial levels. Already the earth has warmed by almost 0.80 C since the Industrial Revolution. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its 4th report estimated that should temperatures rise to 2.0-2.40 C, greenhouse gas emissions must be cut by 50-85% relative to 2000 levels by the year 2050. If nothing is done to check the rise in temperature, up to 30 % of plant and animal species under threat of extinction.
CARBON TRADING
A major loophole in the Kyoto Protocol is that countries that are unwilling to achieve the target set by the protocol can continue with their emission binge but would compensate for such emissions in three possible ways.
1. Such countries can buy emissions rights from countries who do not exhaust their emissions quota.
2. Industrialised countries could invest in forestry and soil conservation projects elsewhere with the understanding that such projects would lead to absorption of carbon to equally compensate for their continued emissions.
3. Such countries can also invest abroad in projects that would save on greenhouse gases. Such projects are known as Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects and are often carried out in countries that do not have obligatory limits. They can also invest in Joint Implementation (JI) projects in other industrialised countries.
Thus, the major thrust of carbon trading and carbon offset strategies is to transfer the responsibilities for the impacts of climate change to the South while the polluters reap profits from the new business built upon disasters. In other words, actions that ought to call for penalties are now overlooked because of some queer financial mechanisms that leave the environment at the mercy of powerful polluters. Carbon trade and other false solutions as genetic modified organisms, carbon sinks, ocean fertilisation, carbon storage, agrofuels, among others, are formulas that leave aside the oil industry, the number one sector responsible for global warming [4].
These mechanisms aim to transfer the responsibilities and the impacts to the South, creating new threats for the peoples such as conversion of indigenous territories into plantations, land grabbing and displacements of populations. These mechanisms provide a cover for forests to be given to private businesses and equally aid the privatisation of protected areas and natural forests; occupation of peasant and agricultural lands, and the deprivation of the local communities of their rights and livelihoods. All these mean a subsidy to the polluter/business and a stimulus for energy guzzling countries in the North, to maintain their production and consumption models.
THE POST 2012 SCENARIO
Long before the meetings of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in December of 2007 at Bali, it was already clear that the most polluting countries are not interested in fulfilling the agreements reached in international meetings on climate. Their energies were now geared towards a post-2012 design.
A pointer to this was clear from the G8 meeting in 2005 at Gleneagles where the leaders asked the World Bank (WB) to prepare a framework to address climate change. The Bank obliged and produced a document with the title Clean Energy and Development: Towards an Investment Framework" by April 2006.
This was an excellent opportunity for the WB to position itself as a core player in governance of climate change. The bank produced its Strategic Framework on Climate Change and Development for the Bank Group in 2008 and that document is awaiting approval by the Bank's Board later on this year. Meanwhile the WB has a new proposal entitled Climate Investment Funds (CIFs) that we will look at briefly.
The CIFs are supposedly aimed at "helping developing countries address urgent climate change challenges." Analysts believe however that this is just another strategy by the bank to capitalize on the current concerns around climate change [5].
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