Civil society march in Copenhagen. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS

By Raúl Pierri and Daniela Estrada

COPENHAGEN (IPS/TerraViva)  COP15 proved to be a “spectacular failure even according to its own terms,” but civil society had “some successes,” such as the inclusion of certain issues on the climate agenda, and making the voice of the South heard loud and clear.

That was how activists assessed their efforts at COP15 as the climate change talks came to an agonising end Saturday in Copenhagen.

Barred from the Bella Center, the official venue, and treated harshly by security forces at some of the massive demonstrations held throughout the two weeks of the conference, representatives of civil society – gathered simultaneously in the Danish capital at their own people’s climate summit, Klimaforum09 – highlighted a series of victories achieved.

“Despite the lack of transparency, civil society organisations have given visibility to positions that are more in line with climate justice, which we see as the only way to move towards a sustainable planet,” Eduardo Giesen, Latin American and Caribbean coordinator for Friends of the Earth International’s Climate Justice and Energy Programme, told TerraViva.

“We focused our efforts on supporting developing countries so they could present a united front against the demands of the industrialised world, and not give in to pressures that in some cases bordered on colonialism,” he added.

Klimaforum09 closed its two weeks of activities with a concert and a ceremony where this year’s organisers transferred organisational duties to representatives of Mexico and Latin America, where the next parallel summit will be held in 2010.

“The general sensation is that what wasn’t achieved at the Bella Center was achieved at Klimaforum” in terms of content consensus and forging of alliances, Giesen said.

For her part, Canadian journalist and researcher Naomi Klein called on activists to not give up hope. “I think it’s really important to make sure that we don’t leave this gathering feeling discouraged,” she said.

According to Klein, the fact that negotiators at the Bella Center were unable to reach an agreement even within their own conception of how to address climate change is proof that it is a failed model.

“That’s why it is very important to go forward and tell a different story of what happened here in Copenhagen. That story must be that their model reveals itself to be a spectacular failure even according to its own terms,” she said.

“And because their model failed, it’s our turn now. So don’t allow yourselves to get depressed,” she added.

In Klein’s view, the model has failed because of its emphasis on the carbon market and other market-based mechanisms.

“Discourse about climate change has been really taken over by technocrats, (it’s become) very bureaucratised, and has been extremely exclusive. This is actually similar to the discussion on trade a decade ago, where it was all acronyms, all incredible impenetrable long talks,” she said.

“And many people felt: I can’t be part of the discussion, I don’t have an advanced degree on economics, I can’t participate,” she added.

Klein underlined the need to reject “the model” in which negotiations are conducted under the Convention.

“We need to reject any measure that allows the countries that created the problem to evade their responsibility, (which is) that they need to cut their emissions,” she stressed.

For his part, Giesen condemned international NGOs that “toe the line” of industrialised countries and back counterproductive mechanisms.

“Our NGOs work with communities to achieve environmental justice. We haven’t turned into consultancy firms seeking to finance their activities by any means, like certain multinational NGOs who have found in the carbon market a way to make a lot of money. They’ve bought into capitalism,” he said.

Klein, meanwhile, highlighted what she saw as the “successes” of the last two weeks. “The rich world can no longer claim not to know (what) failing to act (entails). The voices of the South, the cost of millions of lives, the disappearance of countries and cultures – all that has landed on the agenda,” she said.

Changing the system

“System Change – Not Climate Change,” is the title of the final statement from Klimaforum09, signed by some 360 organizations from around the world.

Drafted months ago and discussed over the last week in the Danish capital, this “People’s Declaration” argues that “there are solutions to the climate crisis,” and puts forward six demands.

“What people and the planet need is a just and sustainable transition of our societies to a form that will ensure the rights of life and dignity of all people and deliver a more fertile planet and more fulfilling lives to present and future generations,” it states.

The signatory organisations called on governments to take urgent climate action, most importantly the “complete abandonment of fossil fuels within the next 30 years, which must include specific milestones for every five-year period.”

They also demanded “an immediate cut in GHG (greenhouse gases) of industrialized countries of at least 40 percent compared to 1990 levels by 2020,” and “recognition, payment and compensation of climate debt for the overconsumption of atmospheric space and adverse effects of climate change on all affected groups and people.”

The statement goes on to reject “purely market-oriented and technology-centred false and dangerous solutions,” such as “nuclear energy, agro-fuels, carbon capture and storage, Clean Development Mechanisms, biochar, genetically ‘climate-readied’ crops, geoengineering, and reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD).”

The “real solutions” are “based on safe, clean, renewable, and sustainable use of natural resources, as well as transitions to food, energy, land, and water sovereignty.”

The signatory organisations also proposed that an “equitable tax on carbon emissions” be established instead of “the regime of tradable emission quotas,” and that multilateral financial bodies like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund “be replaced by democratic and equitable institutions functioning in accordance with the United Nations Charter.”

They also demanded a “mechanism for strict surveillance and control of the operations of TNCs (transnational corporations).”

“Irrespective of the outcome of the Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change, there is an urgent need to build a global movement of movements dedicated to the long-term task of promoting a sustainable transition of our societies,” the statement concludes.
(END/2009)

Climate activists arrested by the Danish police. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/TerraViva

By Stephen Leahy

COPENHAGEN (IPS/TerraViva) There is no Copenhagen climate treaty. History was not made here and no deal was sealed.

After two years of intense negotiations by 194 countries, what is abundantly clear is the enormous divide between the rich and poor countries. Poor countries want deep cuts in emissions by the industrialised world, and the latter continue to resist significant cuts and legally binding targets.

Despite the enormous pressures, high expectations and last minute efforts by 128 heads of state, all that emerged is a vague agreement of sorts called the “Copenhagen Accord”.

“Sealing the deal” on a new climate treaty has been postponed for at least a year.

Speaking of divides, civil society largely calls Copenhagen an utter disaster. It is a failure that “condemned millions of the world’s poorest people to hunger, suffering and loss of life”, said Nnimmo Bassey, chair of Friends of the Earth International.

On the other hand, U.S. President Barack Obama argued that a “meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough” had been made at press conference in the Bella Centre just before midnight Friday. “All major economies have come together to accept their responsibility to take action to confront the threat of climate change,” he said.

Evidently, world leaders hadn’t been paying much attention to the previous 15 years of climate treaty negotiations.

“Heads of state are now fully engaged,” agreed Robert Orr, U.N. assistant secretary general for policy planning, speaking at a press conference. “Copenhagen was the first time leaders were using the climate vocabulary.”

“This has put climate on the map for leaders and leaders on the map for climate,” he said.

Orr also said the gap between politics and science is finally beginning to close.

The hour is late for waking up to the reality of climate change. Two new scientific studies suggest that climate feedbacks will make the two-degree C target unlikely to be achieved without “going negative” – meaning not only does the world have to go carbon-free in the coming decades, carbon will need to be removed from the atmosphere to lower concentrations to perhaps 350 ppm from today’s 389 ppm.

It was late last night in the final hours of the meeting when the U.S. president announced that India, South Africa, China and Brazil had agreed to a backroom agreement called the Copenhagen Accord.

However, since it only involved five out of the 193 countries whose officials had spent a long two weeks in Copenhagen, some delegates were visibly upset they’d not been involved previously and the meeting continued all night. By Saturday afternoon, confusion remained over the accord’s legal status, and half a dozen nations, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Bolivia, declined to support it.

In the end, the accord has no legal standing under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and participating countries merely “note” its existence and express their support or not.

Friday night, Obama acknowledged that this was just one step on a long road to meet the apolitical targets of climate science. He insisted the Copenhagen Accord is an important first step because countries agreed to deep long-term cuts in emissions with the goal of holding the increase in global temperatures below two degrees C.

Developing countries also agreed to take both voluntary action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to increase those actions if financial support was provided. And there was agreement that rich countries must mobilise 100 billion dollars a year by 2020 to help developing countries protect their forests, adapt to climate change and reduce their emissions.

They also agreed to work towards a legally binding treaty to be concluded by the end of next year in Mexico.

“The U.S. is not legally bound by anything that took place here in Copenhagen,” Obama was careful to point out.

Domestically, the United States is a divided country, and a long way from making binding commitments on climate.

Not an hour after Obama’s opening speech to the plenary Friday morning, several Republican members of Congress and the Senate held a press conference in the Bella Centre denying climate change was caused by emissions of fossil fuels and saying the science of the International Panel on Climate Change and dozens of scientific academies around the world was suspect.

None of the U.S. politicians are scientists and all hail from regions with powerful fossil fuel or automotive interests.

“We have lost many things along the way,” said Dessima Williams of Grenada, spokesperson for the 43-member Association of Small Island States (AOSIS), regarding their reluctant acceptance of the accord. “We have lost a vigourous commitment to stabilising global temperatures at 1.5 C.”

“We believe this is critical to the survival of our member states,” Williams said in a final plenary session Saturday.

Women were also hoping for gender-sensitive text to acknowledge the reality that women are by far the most impacted by climate change, said Ana Rojas of Energia, an International Network of Gender and Sustainability based in the Netherlands.

Only a third of the delegates attending the conference this year are women, which can make it more difficult for equal representation of women and men’s views in relation to climate change.

“We need a shared vision of gender in a final agreement. And not just concerning adaptation but also mitigation and financing,” Rojas told TerraViva.

While acknowledging that the accord represents some progress, it fell far short of the “fair, ambitious and legally binding agreement” that civil society had advocated. Outside the meetings, 1,800 protesters and media spokespersons were arrested on the suspicion they might do something illegal, in what civil society called attempts by the Danish government to suppress legitimate opposition and free speech.

The use of “tear gas, pepper spray, mass cages, baton charges and mass preemptive arrests sets a precedent dangerous not only for Denmark, but for the future of the world,” said Tadzio Müller of  Climate Justice Action, an international network of environmental and social justice groups.

“The world is facing tragic crises of leadership [on climate change],” said Greenpeace’s international executive director, Kumi Naidoo.

The accord represents a “major concession to climate polluting industries, especially in the fossil fuel sector”, Naidoo said. “Averting climate chaos has just gotten a whole lot harder.”

COPENHAGEN, Dec 19 (IPS/TerraViva) – Many countries treat Bangladesh as a country that is so afflicted by calamities that it is incapable of pulling itself out of dire poverty. Yet, it has blazed a trail in drawing up blueprints for community-driven climate adaptation strategies.

Part of this blueprint is to revive traditional farming practices that could withstand extreme weather changes.

“People used traditional farming practices,” notes Prof Ainun Nishat, a former academic, now senior advisor for climate in Asia to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Dhaka, told IPS. “We had 5,000 varieties of rice which could withstand this variability, but have now been lost.”

Non-government organisations and the IUCN have for several years been encouraging people to revive such practices. In undivided Bengal, before the partition of India in 1947, for instance, it was common for people to set aside five percent of their land for a pond to breed fish and irrigate paddy.

He cites a programme reintroducing water-tolerant species as well as those that can survive in floods, drought and salinity, a breakthrough. There is a species of rice that can be submerged under water for 15 days without deteriorating. The new government is also implementing a project to resuscitate river networks.

Since Bangladesh receives up to two billion tonnes of sediment from the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers every year, it is encouraging communities to maintain the age-old networks of small rivers and canals, which have fallen into disrepair. Traditionally in Bengal, these were excavated by manual labour under the supervision of the local community and this valuable practice is being revived.

“This initiative is community-based,” he says. “It is both top-down and bottom-up. Collectively, we sensitise the government.”

“Bangladesh is nature’s disaster laboratory,” says Prof Nishat. “Apart from volcanoes, we have every type (of disaster),” he adds, stressing the urgency of adopting mitigation measures, particularly at the community level. He is particularly worried about the erratic monsoon, which can give rise to drought-like conditions.

A decade ago, experts realised that to help people combat climate variability, they had to find alternative means of generating incomes. One way was to harvest the troublesome hyacinth weed in ponds and pile it to grow seedlings. IUCN and non-government organisations introduced these methods in two coastal islands of Bhola and Hatiya.

A. Atiq Rahman, the well-known executive director of the Bangladesh Centre of Advanced Studies, who took part in the just concluded climate talks in this Danish capital, organised three international workshops to synthesise the lessons drawn from efforts to explore alternative sources of income. The Bangladesh government expressed an interest in the proceedings. When it had to formulate plans to cope with climate change in 2003-2005, it did away with the normal route of hiring consultants and created seven task forces, half of which were headed by non-government experts, including Prof Nishat.

The government allocated 200 million U.S. dollars for this purpose, for which 12 to 15 projects were shortlisted. Importantly, the task forces were not put under a ministry or directorate but operated with a high degree of autonomy. “This was because of the cross-cutting nature of these problems: every ministry was involved.”

“A key issue is food security,” he says. “The seal-level rise is less worrying than the ingress of salinity.” By 2100, it is estimated that salinity may travel 89 metres inland, and this will affect people’s livelihoods.

Experts are also monitoring “storm surges” and cyclones, which have increased in intensity and frequency. Between 1960 and 2009, there were 15 major events; from 2007, there have already been four. “The sea is also growing rough and preventing fishermen from venturing out on certain days,” Prof Nishat reports.

In 2007, then Environment Minister C.S. Karim asked officials and NGOs to contribute to a report in the build-up to the Copenhagen conference. To operationalise the Bali Action Plan – the so-called “road map” to a new global climate treaty – the government was fully engaged in drawing up an adaptation strategy, which attracted the attention of donors.

Funding for the strategy came from the British government, the World Bank and the British Department for International Development. The resulting ‘Bangladesh Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan 2009’, was published in September or three months ahead of the Copenhagen talks.

There are six themes: food security, social protection and health; disaster management; infrastructure; research and knowledge management; mitigation and low-carbon development; and capacity building and institution strengthening.

“This is an open-ended document in the making, not a finished product,” Prof Nishat clarifies. “Low-carbon growth is an important component. We hope to add people’s responses to the projects listed under each theme.”

The new government, headed by Sheikh Hasina, has instituted a task force to review these activities. “She has strengthened the political commitment to tackle climate change,” he says. “It was in her election manifesto.”

Fabricio Vanden Broeck

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO (IPS/TerraViva) – “In a year’s time, the Japanese archipelago will be completely under water.” This official announcement was made following a violent eruption of Mt. Fuji, as a series of devastating earthquakes shook the country, forcing the world to face the challenge of taking in 110 million refuges within a very short time.

After a brutal diplomatic battle, the Japanese government managed to secure frail support from its fellow nations and evacuate 65 million people. Twenty million sank with the islands, many of them voluntarily, out of love for their country or to give younger people a better chance of fleeing. The rest are believed to have died before the islands sank, victims of the quakes, tsunamis and other natural disasters.

This account is part of a futuristic book published in Japan in 1973, and translated into English as “Japan Sinks”. The author, Japanese novelist Komatsu Sakyo, imagines this catastrophe based on potential natural phenomena, such as the intensification and alteration of tectonic plate shifts under the Pacific Ocean.

But outside the world of fiction, the planet today is being hit by increasingly frequent floods, and many small island states and coastal cities face the real possibility of sinking in the near future. And all of this is a result of human actions.

The threat in real life is coming from above rather than below, but the consequences are equally tragic, even if they appear less catastrophic because they are more spread out in time and space.

A huge cataclysm like the one depicted by Sakyo may be what the world needs to reach an effective agreement that will steer it away from the suicidal path of global warming.

Certain changes, especially those wrought against the economic tide, are only possible after exceptional tragedies or social turmoil. Last year’s global financial crisis, for example, was not dramatic enough to bring about structural changes.

The magnitude of Sakyo’s fictional disaster does not lie merely in the number of victims, but in the fact that it completely wipes out a rich nation like Japan, a country that many in the 1970s saw as challenging the economic power of the United States. The novel is also critical of the arrogance displayed by Japan in the post-war reconstruction period.

The fact that tropical countries, especially small, impoverished nations, will suffer the worst effects of global warming fails to prompt cooperation that should be natural in our present circumstances, as it is a threat that affects the entire world.

The current climate crisis highlights the multiple dimensions of the inequalities among nations, which hinder negotiations. The leading issues – such as legally-binding targets for emissions and funding for programs to address climate change – divide the world, with wealthy countries on one side and the rest of the world on the other, and a middle group of emerging nations whose intention to continue to be counted within the ranks of the poor nations (in terms of emissions cuts, etc) is rejected by the rich.

This inequality is a spoke in the wheel of any multilateral talks, in both market, financial, patent or health matters.

These are all opportunities for developing countries to close the gap that separates them from the rich and obtain more aid for their own development, now with the irrefutable argument that the industrialised world is responsible for the historic accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

But when it comes to climate change, the blocs formed in other forums fall apart. Brazil, for example, is persistently under pressure from environmentalists to break away from the G77 group of 130 developing nations so that it can contribute to reaching an agreement and regaining the leadership role it had in the negotiations for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992, and the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.

Because it has specific and feasible means to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – by curbing deforestation and increasing its already vastly developed clean energy production -, environmental activists argue that it would be to Brazil’s own advantage to commit to ambitious targets.

China, which is associated with the G77, alienated itself from the coalition by moving closer to the United States in volume of greenhouse gases emitted, building one coal-fired electric power plant a week, and holding more than two trillion dollars in reserves.

It’s frightening to think of 1.3 billion Chinese speeding forward towards what is now recognised as an unsustainable process of industrialisation and consumption.

The position of countries that are rich in fossil fuels differs radically from that of those dependent on imported oil. Latitudes and altitudes, the abundance or lack of forests, the threat of desertification, or the dependence on glaciers are some of the many aspects that mark the differences in how climate change impacts each country.

Numerous small island states are already fighting for survival, so they have joined forces with those African nations that are severely affected by desertification and major crop losses to demand that 1.5 degrees C be set as the limit for the rise in temperature in this century. Exceeding that threshold will condemn entire nations to almost certain death or displacement.

But, what power do these countries have to counter the two-degree limit adopted?

This is not about rich countries imposing their will on poor countries, or of a class struggle between states. The goals that must be met are being dictated by scientific studies and assessments. Climate change has crowned a new absolute power: the power of science, whose findings are now determining the very existence of the world’s entire population.

Thousands of scientists who participated in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) agreed that a temperature rise of two degrees C by 2100 is a feasible and tolerable limit. Above that, chaos will ensue.

Climate sceptics don’t count. They’re a tiny minority and, in many cases, have lost credibility because they are thought to defend the interests of the fossil fuel industry, or to act out because they feel attacked by attempts to prevent the great climate disaster.

Voices have already been raised against the verdict issued by climate experts, voices that demand that society be included in decision-making, with suggestions of holding referendums. But this is a field where the premises lay outside the dynamics of “democracy.” Climate change is a fact, not an issue.

Politics can only decide on how to handle the phenomenon. Questioning it or determining any variations in the facts is the exclusive domain of science.

This new dimension of what many refer to as the “age of knowledge” will dictate the rules that govern many activities, demanding energy efficiency, and forcing people to change their patterns of consumption and their habits, as has already been achieved, for example, with tobacco in the field of health.
(END/2009)

Activists meeting at Klimaforum. Credit: Daniela Estrada/IPS

Daniela Estrada

COPENHAGEN (IPS/TerraViva) Before the outcome of COP 15 has even emerged, Latin American social organisations are already discussing their strategies for the next climate summit, to be held in a year’s time in Mexico.

The primary challenge is to broaden and strengthen the links between the different civil society movements and networks in the region, the international coordinator of Jubilee South, Beverly Keene, told TerraViva.

Jubilee South is a network of social movements and people’s organisations in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia, formed in 1999 to fight for “freedom from debt and domination” in developing countries.

Keene spoke at a session of Klimaforum09 – the civil society meeting held parallel to the climate change summit in Copenhagen – focused on what directions to take on the road to COP 16, in December 2010 in the Mexican capital.

“Frankly, I do not expect anything (from COP 15). We have stated very clearly that no agreement at all is better than one which only reinforces the false solutions we have been fighting,” Camila Moreno of Brazil, a member of Friends of the Earth International, told TerraViva at another Klimaforum session.

Activists concur that the international movement for climate justice has grown stronger over the past year.

One of its main achievements was the first hearing of the International Court of Climate Justice, celebrated in October in the eastern Bolivian city of Cochabamba by NGOs from all over the world. Seven cases, claiming environmental harm contributing to climate change, were presented by Latin American communities and civil society organisations.

A people’s tribunal independent of formal justice systems, the aim of the Court is to pass ethical and moral judgment on transnational corporations and complicit states in order to raise the visibility of environmental crimes and the changes needed to coexist in balance with nature.

“The invitation is to begin the journey toward Mexico 2010. This time COP is coming to our house (Latin America), and we must start mobilising,” said Lyda Fernanda Forero, of the secretariat of the Hemispheric Social Alliance (HSA), an umbrella group for over 60 social networks in the Americas.

Nicola Bullard, of Climate Justice Now (CJN), a global network of organisations and movements, said climate change provided an opportunity to forge stronger links between the struggles of civil society against the World Trade Organisation and other multilateral institutions.

The destruction of the environment goes hand-in-hand with social inequality, she said, at the session that was also addressed by Keene.

The issue of climate change must become a political problem, one that challenges the capitalist model of development, and that does not allow governments and transnational corporations to take a short cut to “green capitalism,” with low greenhouse gas emissions but the same financial architecture, activists argue.

Amparo Miciano, of the World March of Women, highlighted the fact that during the two weeks’ duration of COP 15 and Klimaforum, people from the industrialised North and the developing South joined together to confront the climate crisis.

“I have experienced big civil society mobilisations. I’m from Porto Alegre (in southern Brazil), where the World Social Forum (WSF, an annual global gathering held as a counterpoint to the World Economic Forum) came into being, and what is happening here reminds me a lot of the first WSF there. It’s like a huge public education event,” Moreno said.

“Copenhagen will be a watershed,” said the Brazilian activist.

In the view of CJN’s Bullard, world public opinion is on the side of the concept of “climate justice,” and this support must be utilised.

For his part, Diego Azzi, a Brazilian labour activist responsible for regional integration for the Trade Union Confederation of the Americas (TUCA), said that Latin American trade unionists will have a greater presence at COP 16 in Mexico.

“We are trying to raise awareness among Latin American trade unionists about these environmental issues, through what we call ‘auto-reforma sindical’ (internal reforms of labour unions), which is linked to the trade union perspective on models of development, production and consumption,” he told IPS/TerraViva.

The NGOs are planning a timetable of actions for 2010, but some priorities are already clear: working at grassroots level, raising public awareness and putting pressure on those in government.

One of the most concrete proposals so far is to hold many more sessions and hearings before Courts of Climate Justice, and present the cases dealt with in Mexico.
(END/2009)

"It will take lot of us – probably in the streets" to make politicians face the truth, says climate scientist James Hansen. Credit: TerraViva/Stephen Leahy

No Real Deal, and No Exit

Analysis by Stephen Leahy

COPENHAGEN (IPS/TerraViva) The roof of our house is on fire but our leaders, our economic system and we ourselves are ignoring the alarms and continuing to add more fuel. There are no exit doors in our house; there is nowhere else to go.

Dangerous climate change is already here.

The two-week climate summit in Copenhagen came to an end with disappointing results and details that are still vague.

A ”Copenhagen Accord” was agreed by the US, China, South Africa and India by Friday night. It was unclear which other countries were willing to support it.

But coral reefs are dying, the Arctic is melting and rising sea levels threaten the homes of millions. And we’re on our way to a planet-transforming four-degree C rise in global average temperatures in as soon as 50 years.

Future generations could face an utterly transformed planet, where large areas will be seven to 14 degrees C warmer, making them uninhabitable. In this world-on-fire, the one to two metre sea level rise by 2100 will leave hundreds of millions homeless, according to the latest science presented at the “4 Degrees and Beyond, International Climate Science Conference” at the University of Oxford in September.

That’s the science-based, slap-in-the-face reality as the Copenhagen climate talks fizzle out here with little progress Friday.

“Our leaders do not get the scale of the problem or the rapidity of the changes. They don’t get that it must be dealt with now,” said Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at Canada’s University of British Columbia and lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports.

“Now” means that global carbon emissions peak in five years and begin to decline shortly thereafter to near zero by 2050, according to a report summarising the very latest science by the world’s top climate scientists, including Weaver. Called “The Copenhagen Diagnosis, 2009: Updating the World on the Latest Climate Science”, it was released a week before the talks began here Dec. 7.

“More modest, achievable targets in the short term will get the planet on the right track,” Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been often quoted as saying. Harper’s “modest” target for Canada amounts to a three-percent reduction from 1990 levels by 2020. The U.S. target is little better.

Based on the scientific evidence, the world’s best and brightest climate scientists conclude that Canada and other industrialised nations must reduce emissions 25 to 40 percent by 2020 compared to 1990 to have any hope of keeping the warming at two degrees C.

“Two degrees C will be a very difficult for modern society to cope with,” said Pål Prestrud, an Arctic researcher and director of Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo, Norway.

Even if all emissions were cut off today, global temperatures would decline very slowly – over a period of a thousand years. “If we wait too long, it will be too late to do anything,” Presetrud warned TerraViva here.

No scientist considers stabilising the climate at two degrees warmer to be getting the planet on the right track. The Arctic is already melting at the present 0.8 C of warming. There may be no sea ice in the summer in just 5 to 10 years.

What happens when the cold top of the world that drives the global weather system warms up? Temperature and precipitation patterns in Europe and North America will change, affecting agriculture, forestry and water supplies, the “Arctic Climate Feedbacks: Global Implications” report warned in September.

Worse still, a warmer Arctic will emit large volumes of carbon and methane, which are currently stored in the frozen soils called permafrost. Once that process gets underway, runaway global heating may be unstoppable.

At two degrees warmer, the majority of corals will die due to a combination of warmer temperatures and ocean acidification. Coral reefs are the nurseries for much of the fish in the oceans and hundreds of millions of people are dependent on them. Sea level rise will displace many millions more.

Finally, two degrees C of warming is only the global average. What it really means is that temperatures will range from one to four or five degrees hotter depending on the region. It also means at least one metre of sea level rise by 2100. Countries in Africa, small islands states and the least developed countries are calling for a 1.5 C target here.

Humans have enjoyed 10,000 years of climate stability, in which the global average temperature varied less than one degree C – even during the Little Ice Age and Middle Warming Period, says Robert Corell, director of the Global Change Programme at the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment in Washington, DC.

Global emissions over the past five years have been above the worst case scenarios of the IPCC, and on a path for a five- to six-degree C rise in temperatures by 2100, Corell told TerraViva.

He also warned that Earth’s natural absorbers of carbon, the oceans and forests, are taking up less carbon every year, meaning concentrations of heat-trapping carbon will increase faster than expected.

All the commitments for reductions made in Copenhagen up to date translate into a 3.8-degree C rise in global temperatures, he said in an interview.

“Canada’s federal government doesn’t have a freakin’ clue what two degrees means,” said Canada’s Weaver with vehemence. Vested corporate interests from one sector are blocking the transformation to a low carbon economy, he said: “Big oil is running things.”

“I am sorry to say,” writes James Hansen, “that most of what politicians are doing on the climate front is greenwashing – their proposals sound good, but they are deceiving you and themselves at the same time.”

One of the most respected climate experts, Hansen is director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

“Governments are stating emission goals that they know are lies,” Hansen wrote in the Observer newspaper Nov. 29.

“Are we going to stand up and give global politicians a hard slap in the face, to make them face the truth?” he asked. “It will take lot of us – probably in the streets. Or are we going to let them continue to kid themselves and us, and cheat our children and grandchildren?”

Civil society's message to the leaders meeting in Copenhagen. Credit:Ana Libisch/IPS

COPENHAGEN (IPS/TerraViva) Heads of state and government are working fervently to complete an agreement in Copenhagen, but texts coming out of their midst so far lack details on emissions cuts and long-term funding.

Negotiations – resumed after U.S. President Barack Obama’s speech failed to deliver any tangible targets – are likely to continue into tomorrow.

“While the reality of climate change is not in doubt, I have to be honest, as the world watches us today, I think our ability to take collective action is in doubt right now, and it hangs in the balance,” Obama observed.

The latest draft Copenhagen accord suggests extending the mandate of the LCA and KP working groups to continue discussions, but so far major sticking points between developed and developing countries are not being worked out.

In the latest text the door is left open for a long-term goal of a maximum 1.5 degree rise in global warming to be adopted after 2016 when the agreement is reviewed. Till then, the leaders stick to the two degree temperature threshold spelled out by the IPCC.

No agreement has been reached yet on the amount by which overall emissions should be reduced before 2020, but an overall 50 percent cut by 2050 was adopted. Annex I countries will talk measures to reduce cuts by 80 percent by 2050.

Both developing and developed countries underline the need for emissions to peak ‘as soon as possible’, stressing that this will take more time in developing nations, where poverty eradication and economic growth are the first priorities.

The agreement highlights the need to measure carbon emissions per capita, mentioning “the right to equitable access to atmospheric space”. This point was very important for countries like China and India with large populations.

Other than a $30 billion start-up fund for the period 2010-2012, there are no hard commitments to funding for adaptation and mitigation.

An amount of $100 billion per year by 2020 is proposed for this, but it is unclear how the money will be gathered. On Thursday Friends of the Earth said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s announcement of this figure was “inadequate.”

“We are not sure where the money is coming from; is it public, private, is it self-financing by the developing countries, is it from WB and IMF as well? We should have truly public finance coming from the U.S. as well as other Annex 1 countries, no strings attached.”

Developing countries’ demands for the creation of a new multilateral fund to administer and disperse funding under the Convention has been met with the establishment of the ‘Copenhagen Climate Fund’. Governance of the fund will be shared equally among developing and industrial countries. A Technology Mechanism will be started to accelerate development and transfer of technology.

Mitigation actions by developing countries are required, but not spelled out, and a REDD Plus mechanism is endorsed. There is no mention of women’s rights, or the rights of indigenous peoples, nor is there clarity about the controversial issue of intellectual property rights. The U.S. and China still disagree on the issue of monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV), while the other parties have agreed this should be ‘rigorous, robust and transparent’.

The draft of the ‘Copenhagen Accord’ was supposed to be submitted for discussion in the plenary at 6:00 PM on Friday, but this deadline passed as discussions continued.

Civil society organisations were still speaking of a “failure” in Copenhagen. “I’m not surprised that Copenhagen failed. It was the U.S. goal to obstruct any forward progress here. There is little changed from the Bush to the Obama administrations,” Anne Petermann, co-director of the U.S.-based Global Justice Ecology Project, told TerraViva.

Negotiators from developing countries remained critical about the lack of detail on funding.

“The amount of funding that will be provided to developing countries, especially the most vulnerable, to adapt to climate change as well as to adopt mitigation methods, still needs to be worked out,” said Sri Lankan U.N. ambassador Palitha Kohona. “You can’t expect to provide a pittance and also require them to make the changes, it just won’t work. We’ll need to have adequate sums so that these countries can make the changes necessary.”

“Ten billion dollars a year is a joke,” fumed Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. “The military expenditure of the U.S. is 700 billion dollars per year,” he told the plenary session. “If the climate were a bank it would have been saved already.”

* Claudia Ciobanu and Rajiv Fernando contributed to this report.
(END/2009)

President Barack Obama meets with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao during a bilateral at the COP15 on Dec. 18. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza.

COPENHAGEN (IPS/TerraViva) Tempers flared after U.S. President Barack Obama dropped a bombshell before making a quick exit from an informal meeting of heads of state and government at COP15 Friday.

“Obama said something very ridiculous this morning before going out through that small door,” fumed Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

Chávez also accused western countries of conniving to prepare “a secret document which they will try to push under the door. We’ll not accept that.”

This was after Obama had left the gathering and was reportedly in a secret meeting with other heads of state from developed nations.

Annoyed by Obama’s proposal of a fast-starting fund that will accumulate to 10 billion dollars in 2012 and 100 billion by 2020, Chávez also slammed the U.S. leader’s 17 percent reduction by 2020 and 80 percent reduction by 2050.

Although admitting that developed countries are responsible for the emissions and that other developing countries feel industrialised nations should pay the price, Obama also acknowledged that there are those northern states who feel developing countries cannot absorb this assistance and that the world’s growing emitters should bear the greater burden.

“This would not be a perfect agreement (the one yet to be signed by heads of state) and no country would get everything it wants,” said Obama.

This might have touched a raw nerve.

“Developed nations are very selfish,” Chávez hit back. “Obama is now the world’s greatest frustration, yet in the beginning everybody, even outside the United States, believed in him.”

The public spat confirmed the standoff between industrialised countries and poor nations that include the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS).

On Thursday, President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives also criticized the United States’ early proposals, which Obama confirmed Friday. He said temperature rises above 1.5 degrees would submerge his country, turn oceans acidic and destabilize the planet’s climate. Obama, in his proposal Friday, did not offer any solution to this problem.

“The United States says it opposes the 350 (ppm) target because the technologies do not exist to make it a reality,” said Nasheed. “But I know there is no limit to American ingenuity.”

He said this is the country that first announced it would send a man to the moon, and then worked round the clock to build the Apollo spacecraft.

“Get the politics right, and the technology will follow,” he said.

World leaders are not the only ones disappointed in the U.S. president – civil society organisations are also worried Obama’s stance means no solution to climate change.

“The world was waiting for the spirit of ‘yes we can’ but all we got was ‘my way or the highway’,” said Phil Radford, the executive director of Greenpeace USA.

By offering no further commitments on greenhouse gas emissions cuts by the U.S., Obama showed his disregard for the science and the victims of climate change in the United States and abroad, said Radford.

“Obama now risks being branded as the man who killed Copenhagen,” he said.

At the time of writing, rumours were circulating that the climate negotiations might continue beyond Dec. 18, as no consensus had been reached.

All the long hours, financial resources and demonstrations in the cold seem to have gone to waste in Copenhagen.
(END/2009)

Members of Friends of the Earth not allowed into the Bella Center. Nasseem Ackbarally/IPS

By Claudia Ciobanu* COPENHAGEN (IPS/TerraViva) World leaders speaking in Copenhagen on Friday, the last day of negotiations for a deal on climate change, retreated into their national positions.

US President Barack Obama and his peers could not have been further from the call to “cooperate internationally to ensure respect for human rights everywhere in the world” contained in the People’s Declaration issued by NGOs working at the KlimaForum09 alternative summit.

While leaders of a group of several hundred NGOs were trying to submit a People’s Declaration to the UN in the Bella Center – the site of negotiations during COP15 – world leaders speaking inside the conference venue showed one more time why a fair, ambitious and legally binding treaty cannot be agreed on today.

Leaders of the two major polluters, China and the US, both insisted that their countries will go on working on meeting their announced commitments, regardless of whether an international agreement is reached here in Copenhagen or not.

“We have charted our course, we have made our commitments, and we will do what we say,” said Obama. The president reiterated the pledge made yesterday by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that the US would contribute to a global fund of 100 billion dollars by 2020 to help developing countries deal with climate change.

But he insisted that the US would contribute this money “if and only if it is a part of a broader accord that includes mitigation and transparency.”

Developing countries have repeatedly asked for unconditional aid for adaptation to climate change.

Obama’s speech showed that the US took no heed of this call. And the insistence on transparency was a direct reference to one of the major bones of contention here in Copenhagen – the US demand that China’s emission reduction efforts are monitored internationally.

Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, in his turn, similarly said that his country would stick to its announced commitments regardless of whether a deal is reached in Copenhagen or not. Jiabao said that China would reduce its carbon intensity by 40 to 45 percent.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh reminded, in a similar vein, that his country has adopted and started to implement a national action plan “relying on our own resources” and that the country would reduce energy intensity by 20 percent by 2020 on 2005 levels “regardless of the outcome of this conference.”

Singh added that committing to a document that means reduced expectations “would be wrong.” His statement echoed the warning issued by Friends of the Earth at the outset of the summit that “no deal is better than a bad deal.”

One of the few voices to bring some emotion into the series of official speeches was Brazilian President Inacio Lula da Silva, who started his speech by saying that he was feeling frustrated and that the negotiations in Copenhagen reminded him of his times when he was fighting business leaders as a trade unionist.

Lula bitterly commented on the inappropriateness of leaving the Copenhagen talks to the last minute discussions of heads of state. “I am not sure if such an angel or wise man will come down to this plenary and put in our minds the intelligence that we lacked,” he said.

Early in the afternoon on Friday, the choice seemed to be more and more one between a weak political agreement and no deal at all.

From the perspective of Friday’s country positions, the demands of civil society groups present here in Copenhagen to push for a fair deal on climate change seem catapulted from the moon.

The People’s Declaration, issued by participants in KlimaForum calls for “a complete abandonment of fossil fuels within the next 30 years; recognition, payment and compensation of climate debt by developed to developing countries; a rejection of purely market-oriented and technology-centered false and dangerous solutions (such as nuclear energy, agro-fuels and carbon-capture and storage); and real solutions to the climate crisis based on safe, clean and renewable energy and the transition to food, energy, land and water sovereignty.”

World leaders speaking Friday in Copenhagen were far from one another and far from the calls of citizen groups. The national mitigation plans of developed and large developing countries, that leaders promised to implement no matter what the outcome in Copenhagen is, are certainly market and technology oriented.

Speaking on Thursday in Copenhagen, US Congressmen Henry Waxman and Edward Markey (who give their names to the climate legislation recently passed by the US Congress) anticipated a “green technology revolution” that would help the world keep global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius, even if a treaty sets the target only at a 2 degree rise. They insisted that competition between countries would ensure that better technology is developed and that mitigation efforts are thus increasingly successful.

Yet Copenhagen was not supposed to set the stage for competition. It was supposed to be based on international collaboration among all countries, which face the common threat of climate change.

In the corridors of the Bella Center, nothing is left of the enthusiasm of the first days. The NGOs have been excluded from the center ever since the high-level representatives started coming in on Tuesday. The People’s Declaration will never be submitted to world leaders, who will rush off to their planes and head home this evening.

The only people hanging around the corridors are journalists and lower-ranking members of the delegations, all reduced to listening to the speeches of the heads of state. There is nothing left to do in Copenhagen.

But, as Caetano Juanca, a peasant from Peru, said the other day: “We will continue to fight until they listen to us. Our struggle does not end here.”

*Stephen Leahy contributed to this report.
(END/2009)

COPENHAGEN (IPS/TerraViva) – Unless the world comes to its aid, Bangladesh says the vulnerability of its agriculture sector to climate change could spell severe consequences for its millions of people, who stand to lose their main source of livelihood.

“As a poverty-stricken and densely populated country, we cannot cope with these challenges unless we have a proper financial and technological support from the developed world,” said Sabir Hassan Chowdhary, one of the delegates from Bangladesh to the Copenhagen climate talks, in an interview with TerraViva.

Describing Bangladesh as the most vulnerable country in the world to the impacts of the global environmental phenomenon, delegates from the country are making fervent appeals for international help to prevent further deterioration of its food and livelihood security in the face of frequent droughts, erratic rainfall patterns, cyclones and floods.

The low-lying riverine South Asian country, one of the poorest in the world, lies between the foothills of the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean.

“Over the last few days in Copenhagen itself, a number of research organisations have declared us the most vulnerable country in the world to the impacts of climate change. Therefore we want the world to stand behind us to meet the challenges we are facing,” said Bangladesh’s environment and forest minister Hassan Mamud.

Some 130 heads of state are gathered at the United Nations Climate Conference in this capital. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has expressed optimism that a new climate change deal will be reached at today’s conclusion of the conference. Funding from the developed countries to assist the developing nations in dealing with climate change has been one of the most contentious issues during the historic talks.

“We desperately need the world community to come forward and help us in adapting to the changing climate. And we would like to maintain that the adaptation funds, committed by the developed world, should be in the form of grants, not loans,” he said.

Mamud said 70 percent of such funds should be specifically allocated to the Least Developed Countries, including Bangladesh. “The whole population in Bangladesh is vulnerable to climate change impacts.”

Data culled by researchers working on climate change in the Himalayas show that “at least 20 glacial lakes in Nepal, some of them even 40 meters deep, can burst at any time. If these glacial lakes burst, the entire Bangladesh will get flooded,” Mahmud told TerraViva. “That is why we say that we are more vulnerable than countries like Maldives.”

Bangladesh, “despite being not responsible for the global warming,” he said, has begun exploring measures aimed at mitigation like using compressed natural gas as fuel in public and private transport and harnessing solar energy.

Citing scientific studies, Ziaul Hoque Mukta, another member of the Bangladesh delegation, said sea level will rise by 45 centimetres by 2050 while 10 to 15 percent of the land area of Bangladesh will be lost under water, displacing a large number of the more than 30 million people in the coastal nation.

“Poor landless people, who largely depend upon the coastal natural resources, will be at high risk,” he said, adding that coastal regions comprise 32 percent of the total area of Bangladesh and are home to about 35.1 million people. “So Bangladesh is highly vulnerable to sea-level rise.”

Based on data from the Bangladesh government, 20 percent of the country’s national income is generated by the agricultural sector, which employs approximately 60 percent of the total workforce of this south Asian country.

It is estimated, Mukta said, that 65 percent of the 250-square kilometre area in the coastal island of Kutubdia, 227 sq km in Bhola and 180 sq km in Swandip in Bangladesh “have already gone under water because of the sea-level rise.”

Ainun Nishat, national advisor and senior advisor on climate change to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Bangladesh country office, told TerraViva that despite efforts to alleviate poverty in Bangladesh, 29 percent of the population still lives in abject poverty, with a daily income of less than one U.S. dollar.

Bangladesh is self-sufficient in terms of agricultural production, “but climate change is going to make the food security and livelihood survival very difficult,” Nishat said. Bangladesh has to create a “robust industrial structure” if it wants to adapt to the impacts of climate change in future, he added.

“The erratic rainfalls, droughts and cyclones are already creating problems in the agriculture sector, which can worsen if required steps are not taken,” he said. In June Dhaka received 440 millimetres of rain in a day, or more than double the average daily rainfall of 150 to 180 mm.

“Similarly, frequency or intensity of peak cyclones has also increased during the past few years and four of the last 16 big cyclones since 1960 were witnessed in the last two years only,” Nishat said. These environmental phenomena are putting the food security and security of livelihood at a huge risk, he added.