antics:lite>copenhagen

>>when world leaders met in Copenhagen at the end of 2009, many hoped for a strong commitment to reducing the causes of man-made climate change and to stabilising its effects. However, the outcome of those discussions - the Copenhagen Accord - wasn’t well received. Here, Mike Smith argues that more needs to be done in 2010 to overcome diplomatic obstacles, while Alex Baker suggests we shouldn’t forget just how much progress has been made.

Copenhagen was billed by many as the last chance to prevent the most serious effects of climate change.

Despite some real progress, the Copenhagen Accord fails to outline levels of emission cuts, fails to produce a legally binding agreement and fails to agree a way to measure emissions reductions.

Following the talks blame has been attributed to several actors; China objecting to any figure on limiting emissions, President Obama failing to make an impact on negotiations, Venezuela using the meeting as a platform to criticise America.... the list goes on.

But this blame-game doesn’t address the root cause of the failure to reach a robust agreement – the mismatch between many countries’ perceptions of their national interests and the transnational nature of climate change.

In international negotiations, countries tend to see their national interests as a zero-sum game – one country’s gain is another country’s loss. That is, one country worries that if they reduce emissions, this will damage their economic competitiveness in relation to other countries.

Add to this concerns about

cheating (a country saying it will reduce its emissions but failing to do so) and the political and economic competition between rich and rapidly industrialising countries, and it is easy to see why several major countries were reluctant to agree to a robust deal.

But, negotiating along lines of narrow national interest misses a crucial characteristic of climate change. Climate change is a transnational issue. The impacts - environmental, economic and security - will be felt by the people of every country across the world. With global economic power (and proportions of global emissions) increasingly shifting away from the West and towards newly industrialising countries such as Brazil, India and China, the causes of climate change are also increasingly diffuse. As a result, addressing climate change requires a truly global agreement. No major economy can be left out.

It is this conflict between countries’ perceived national interests and the transnational nature of climate change, which lies at the heart of the failure to reach a robust agreement in Copenhagen. So what needs to change?

Firstly, climate change must be seen as a common threat facing every country, to motivate states to act together. In this light, countries start to see each other as partners rather than competitors. History is full of examples of countries cooperating to address common threats. Think of alliances formed in the World War 2, or the establishment of United Nations itself (imperfect though it is) to address the

‘scourge of war’. Secondly, political ambitions and

climate ambitions need to converge. Leaders, quite rightly, seek to deliver policies which are popular with their national publics, but they do so with a view to the next election.

In this context climate change still seems like a distant threat to most (but not all) governments, even if they know that the right thing to do is to act now. For example, we can see the domestic pressures restricting President Obama’s ability to act on this issue.

The influential Stern Report, commissioned by the Labour Government, clearly makes the case that the global economic impacts of climate change will outweigh the negative economic effects of acting now to limit emissions. NGOs, progressive politicians and other campaigners therefore must turn their efforts towards building public consensus on the urgency of acting now and provide a positive, empowering message about addressing this challenge. This will give leaders both the political impetus and space to deliver a global agreement.

The failure of the Copenhagen Summit to deliver a binding agreement on deep and fair cuts in greenhouse gas emissions is a serious blow to limiting climate change. If in 2010 we are to salvage the ambitions outlined before the Summit, leaders and the public must urgently start to realise that climate change is a common threat, requiring immediate action with the potential to change all of our lives for the better.

> death by a thousand cuts

Mike SmithFormer Communications and Policy Officer for SERA. He writes here in a personal capacity.

avoiding the devastating effects of climate change requires world leaders to move beyond zero-sum diplomacy

young fabiansantics:lite >copenhagen

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The English writer Quentin Crisp once remarked that “if at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.”‘Failure’ was the charge levelled

at the Copenhagen Summit toward the end of last year, where world leaders didn’t manage to meet the monumentally high expectations placed upon them by environmentalists and others concerned about the effects of global warming.

Among the main criticisms of the Copenhagen Accord are that it isn’t legally binding; there are no targets towards achiveiving a reduction in the effects of climate change; delegates only agreed to “take note” of the Accord; and there was a lack of clarity of where climate funds will come from.

Various theories have been posited for why a stronger outcome wasn’t achieved in Copenhagen: free-riding, climate-scepticism, and short term economic priorities over-riding long-term imperatives, among others.

But it is wrong and counter-productive to label the talks, as The Guardian newspaper did the day after the Copenhagen Accord was agreed, a “failure”, or “a crime-scene” as John Sauven, director of Greenpeace UK, did soon after.

Alex BakerNew Media and Publications Officer for the Young Fabians

It is wrong because of the evident progress that has been made in recent years toward achieving broad consensus on the scale of the problem, the likely steps necessary to arrest the adverse consequences of global warming; and the potentially devastating impact of inaction. Copenhagen also marked the first climate change summit where leaders of key developing nations agreed with the direction of travel, if not the specifics of the roadmap.

In addition, some concrete steps were made in Copenhagen to address imbalances in the ability of individual countries to migrate to a sustainable growth path - for example, $30bn a year in subsidies to poor countries from 2012 rising to $100bn by 2020. Time will tell if these pledged funds are actually made available, or used effectively.

Labelling the talks as a failure is also counter-productive. It implies Copenhagen was the last chance we would have to save ourselves from environmental armageddon. Such a view is not only naively optimistic in its expectations of international diplomacy, but also mischaracterises the problem of global warming.

The costs of and efforts required to move the world onto a sustainable growth path in future will rise the longer we delay, as the Stern Review highlighted in 2005. However, we are not heading for environmental apolocalyse just because the Copenhagen Accord was semantically deficient.

Incremental change may be a

second-best outcome - the natural causes of global warming may occur more rapidly than might have occurred with a big-bang of policy proposals from Copenhagen. So might their predicted consequences: death, population displacement, disease, war, famine.

However, incremental change is preferable to the status quo.

While it may be disappointing that more was not achieved, that does not void the progress which was made nor the increased global focus on climate change in recent months and years.

That developed and developing nations, including the US, China and India, could agree on any text relating to tackling climate change is by and of itself an achievement.

But more evidently needs to be done. Those areas which caused friction in Copenhagen are challenging, but not insurmountable. Issues such as how to achieve environmental outcomes while preserving a country’s right to develop economically, or how to share the burden of environmental targets among developed and developing nations, can be resolved with careful thought and consensual approach - the costs of inaction are common, as are the benefits of mitigation.

It is tempting to judge success or failure against your initial aspirations. But doing so increases the risk of forgetting just how far you’ve come.

Copenhagen might have been disappointing. But, on the evidence, it certainly wasn’t a failure.

those who label Copenhagen a ‘failure’ don’t fully appreciate how far we’ve come

> glass half full

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Anticipations:Lite, like all publications of the Young Fabians and Fabian Society, represents not the collective views of the Society but only the views of the indivdual authors.

© Young Fabians 2010. First published March 2010.www.youngfabians.org.uk and www.youngfabians.org.uk/blog

SERA

Labour Party Energy and Climate Change Policy

European Parliamentary Labour Party

The Environment Council

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

Intergovenmental Panel on Climate Change

UK Department for Energy and Climate Change

International Energy Agency