As the Harper government kills the Accountability Act the country courts a bad reputation
Delegates from every corner of the world are preparing to converge in Cancun for this year's round of UN climate talks, from November 29 to December 20. Last year's conference in Copenhagen was a failure. After years of intense negotiations, high expectations for a new binding climate agreement were crushed by clashes between rich industrialized countries, large emerging economies, and poorer states.
Most countries are hoping that the Cancun talks, under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), will at least resolve some of the bad blood from Copenhagen and draw the broad strokes of an agreement for next year. The UNFCCC's new Executive Secretary, Christiana Figueres, has said, "Cancun will be a success, if parties compromise." So you'd hope that as the cost of inaction grows greater every day, Canada would be taking responsibility for helping get the job done in Mexico. You'd be wrong.
According to environmental groups and observers inside and outside the country, Canada won't be taking much more than bikinis and board shorts to Cancun.
"We're bringing less than nothing," says Daniel T'seleie, a Northern Climate Intern at Climate Action Network heading to the conference with the Canadian Youth Delegation. "All we're bringing is trouble, stalling and blocking negotiations. This process would probably be more constructive if Canada weren't at the table."
T'seleie, a member of the K'asho Got'ine First Nation from Northwest Territories, also travelled to Copenhagen last year. His involvement in the climate movement is rooted in his family's direct experiences with the problems caused by warming winter temperatures. Their lifestyle is still based around hunting and trapping he says, but one recent January, his uncle actually fell through a patch of river ice at a time when the temperature should have been below -40. T'seleie says despite climate change impact already being felt at home, the rest of the world knows Canada is obstructing progress.
The scientific consensus is that our world is rapidly warming due to human greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, whose impacts are approaching dangerous tipping points we may not be able to come back from. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has shown that every decade over the past 30 years has been hotter than the last. Deke Arndt, chief of the Climate Monitoring Branch of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, has noted simply,
"The temperature increase of one degree Fahrenheit over the past 50 years may seem small, but it has already altered our planet."
An obstacle to progress
Canada is earning an international reputation as an obstacle to progress in the UN climate process. Our government's refusal to even attempt to meet ostensibly binding Kyoto Protocol commitments, and the lack of repercussions, have troubled those trying to create new legally binding targets after the first round expires in 2012. More recently, the Conservatives dealt a crippling blow to any hopes of immediate action when they used a surprise Senate vote on November 17 to kill the Climate Accountability Act.
Although the NDP-sponsored bill had its flaws, it would have required the government to demonstrate a plan towards the deep emissions cuts advocated by the UN's climate science advisory body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It would also have required public audits of the government's progress. All three opposition parties in the House of Commons had voted in favour of the bill, which Conservative Senators voted down without even the pretence of a debate while a large group of Liberal senators were absent. This is the first time in over half a century that the Senate has killed a bill passed by the elected members in the House of Commons.
It is debatable whether the Conservatives would have acted on the commitments set out in the bill, which Prime Minister Harper called "irresponsible" in its scale. It would have required national greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to drop 25% below 1990 levels by 2020. This would be a steep task considering how much our emissions have risen since then, and over the past year, the government has complained it cannot act in any way ahead of the US.
It has joined the US in agreeing to 17% cuts from 2005 levels by 2020. Put aside for a moment the fact that there is no reason to use this same arbitrary benchmark for two economies at completely different scales. The rest of the world is comparing their targets to 1990 emissions. Our emissions are set to remain 0.25% above those levels.
Staking our survival on a flawed process
T'seleie admits that trying to communicate with government delegates "is like beating your head against a wall." Stolen moments together in the cafeteria line and question periods with the lead negotiator are among the only chances they get to sway the representatives with their status as observers. But he says they still have a valuable role to play in showing Canadians more than the government's side of the story, and holding it accountable through the media attention they generate.
So what is this process he and many others are investing so much time and energy into, anyway? Until recently, you'd probably never hear of small island states like the Maldives and Nauru unless you were planning a vacation or looking for an offshore bank. But under threat of rising sea-levels poisoning their fresh water sources and eventually consuming their islands, they're among the many states in the global South taking leadership in the UNFCCC negotiations, and staking their survival on the outcomes. Why are they so committed to the talks the Canadian government seems intent on obstructing, and what do they hope will emerge from them?
The UNFCCC began as an agreement by nearly every state in the world to address climate change after the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. Since 1995, member countries have been meeting annually to work out specific international commitments and cooperation. The best known agreement to emerge from this process, of course, is the Kyoto Protocol, which tasked industrialized countries like Canada with specific emissions reductions (or mitigation), either domestically or by purchasing credits from other nations doing more than their share.
Developing countries are very eager to work out the post-2012 round of Kyoto, since it is a legally binding treaty that holds industrialized countries accountable for addressing our share of a crisis we are mainly responsible for creating. It carries behind it the weight of full international consensus, and the force of international law. For the very same reasons, industrialized countries are dragging their heels on continuing it.
But the scope of the current round of UNFCCC talks is wider than this. Slowing the rising emissions of emerging economies like Brazil, India, China and South Africa is also on the table. Crucially, so are financing structures for climate change mitigation and adaptation in the global South, where most of the world's most vulnerable populations live.
Over the past year, so much momentum has dissipated that UK commentator George Monbiot recently wrote off the whole process as a dead dream, nurtured for too long by green activists with fantasies of bureaucratic salvation. But some countries have, in fact, kept up the pressure to wring a democratic-endorsed, fair and binding treaty out of this process. Many were angered by the Copenhagen Accord hammered out in the final hours of the conference. It's been assailed both for the secretive way it was created and for its weak method of setting emissions targets.
Developing countries want a treaty that sets a cap on the global carbon budget, which countries can then claim their fair share of. Instead, the Copenhagen Accord asks countries signing it to agree to a goal of no more than a 2°C temperature rise from pre-industrialized times by 2050, and then volunteer the cuts they'll make to make that possible. It's no wonder then that projections from the Copenhagen commitments so far add up to a temperature increase of 3-4°C.
Bolivia and Venezuela are among the countries that have rejected the Accord for those reasons. Their disenchantment with the UN process, shared by civil society groups who were shut out in Copenhagen, led to the World People's Conference on Climate Change in Cochabamba, Bolivia in April. Indigenous groups, social movements, governments and environmentalists gathered to discuss solutions more inclusively. This has put pressure on UNFCCC head Figueres to facilitate more inclusive dialogue in Cancun.
Negotiators have also worked through the year in Bonn, Germany and Tianjin, China to build the framework of the discussions in Cancun, and so far none have backed down from their earlier financing and mitigation commitments. Many countries are taking action at home, from the European Union's cap-and-trade scheme to Brazil's efforts to slow deforestation. Of course, there are still areas where progress seems stalled, like the inability of G20 leaders to agree on a specific timeline to phase out subsidies for fossil-fuel industries.
What should come out of Cancun
So what is the best possible outcome from Cancun (besides a great tan and Coronas on the beach)? A binding, all-encompassing treaty isn't feasible. But one substantial outcome would be faster and more transparent delivery of the $30 billion that industrialized countries have offered annually 'til 2012 for clean energy development and adaptation in developing countries.
Developing countries want this money to be given as grants, not loans, since many see this as part of the climate debt owed by the countries that have polluted the most. They also want it to be new money, not repackaged foreign aid, as these are additional and compounding challenges to the ones they already face.
Indigenous and environmental groups also want to make sure REDD's financing for protection and sustainable management of forests doesn't just end up privatizing forest resources and circumventing Indigenous land rights. Countries could agree on how these concerns will be addressed while sustaining the social and biodiversity benefits of forests. Mechanisms to help developing countries get easier access to clean energy technology are also crucial, to allow them to industrialize in a more sustainable way.
But with the death of Canada's only legislation setting national emissions targets in line with those recommended by the IPCC and approaching our Kyoto commitments, it is unclear how Canada will contribute meaningfully to achieving the global emissions reductions needed, or have the goodwill to negotiate effectively with developing countries.
For his part, Daniel T'seleie says he doesn't have as much faith in the UN process as some of the other Canadian youth delegates do. "It takes pressure off countries like Canada to make emissions cuts domestically. We need to start immediately. The process creates this illusion that we need to wait for global agreement to move."
But, he adds, there is still important work to be done on the international stage. "One thing that needs to be a focus this year is rebuilding trust between large nations in the North and small nations in the South." T'seleie also says it's important to make sure the climate financing we're giving is being used the way it should be and getting to the people who need it. He shares a concern recently pointed out by the Pembina Institute that while we are mostly meeting our fair share of climate financing, the majority of it will be going through the World Bank investment loan branch, not to grants.
Young people need to take control of the situation, T'seleie says. "It's all well and good for somebody who won't be alive in 2050 to mess this up for us today, but when we're elders we're going to live in a drastically different world – less biodiversity, more drought, more conflict over resources. We have to let people know that we're aware of this problem, that we know they're not solving it, and that we'll do whatever needs to be done to make sure it does get solved."
The UNFCCC? Some Quick Facts:
After the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, most of the world's countries agreed to tackle climate change through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Every year since 1995, countries under the convention have met to negotiate how to achieve this. The general agreement is still being expanded through more specific tools, including:
• Kyoto Protocol – sets legally-binding emissions targets for industrialized countries
• Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) – provides incentives for developing countries to preserve and sustainably manage forests
• Clean Development Mechanism – allows countries to meet their Kyoto targets by funding projects in developing countries to earn emissions credits
