What Just Happened at Durban?


In the end, it was the final fifty minutes of negotiations on the fly between the heads of the Indian and EU delegations that reached a compromise agreement at 3:30 am Sunday at the Climate Summit in Durban, ending the longest running climate summit ever, a dubious achievement. 

EU and India occupied center stage in the dispute over whether emerging economic powers such as China and India should have the same legal responsibilities for controlling their greenhouse gas emissions as do industrial countries.  The compromise Durban Platform for Enhanced Action was embraced, if not fondly, but at least with relief by exhausted delegates, most of whom worked through two or three nights of negotiations. 

In diplospeak, the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action is an "agreed outcome with legal force," rather than the more vague "legal outcome" that India and China wanted, or a "protocol with legal instrument," EU's preference. 

However, under the Platform, all nations will be required to commit to reducing emissions starting in 2020. But that will require the climate summit in Qatar next year to launch negotiations toward an agreement by 2015 to include targets that countries will have to achieve in 2020.

Reaching a  deal by 2015 will be  arduous. The Durban agreement also extends the Kyoto Protocol for the EU and a few other developed countries during a second commitment period after 2012. The rest of the world will have only voluntary commitments until 2020. 

The following Regulation & The Environment column published in Monday's Platts Oilgram News, was written prior to the conclusion of the Durban meeting.

Against a background of record greenhouse gas emissions, extreme weather, severe flooding, devastating heat waves and droughts, the United Nations climate summit in Durban, South Africa, seemed to lack the fierce urgency of now.

But in a familiar ritual, and a frantic final effort to chart a "road map" to a new global warming deal, negotiators ignored the scheduled December 9 closing date. Formal negotiations adjourned late December 9 and were to resume December 10.

Expectations for Durban were very low, which was wise given the embarrassing "Seal-the-Deal" Copenhagen summit in 2009 that failed to deliver a legally binding agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol's first commitment period set to expire December 31, 2012.

"Talk of any legally binding instrument [in Durban] would be irresponsible, very irresponsible," NJ Mxakato-Diseko, South Africa's ambassador-at-large for the conference, told AFP. "To even begin to suggest that the outcome must be a legally binding agreement would be irresponsible, because it will collapse the system."

Which is rather remarkable, if you consider that when the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in 1997, it was thought a small down payment on controlling anthropogenic greenhouse emissions. It also only covered emissions from industrial countries, just as China, India and Brazil were emerging as major economies (China is now the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases). It was assumed that by the end of 2012 a second agreement would be in place, supplanting Kyoto, requiring deeper emission reductions and encompassing emerging economies as well as industrial countries.

It is a measure of the fragility of these negotiations between the industrial nations of the "North" and their emerging economic competitors of the "South," and their political differences and conflicting priorities, that Mxakato-Diseko could say it would "collapse the system" to discuss mandatory controls on greenhouse gas emissions just a year before the expiration of the only international agreement mandating controls on emissions.

The US, not a party to Kyoto, has said it will not agree to a legally binding agreement that does not include China and other major players. The EU is balking at a binding accord without the US and China on board.

"Everybody's got their own interest," Todd Stern, US special envoy for climate change, told National Public Radio prior to Durban. "But if [the other big players] are not prepared to do those things yet, then we are not prepared to go forward on the basis of the old-style agreement, which essentiality has a firewall between all developed countries and all developing countries."

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Stern believes a binding agreement is unlikely before 2020 and is banking on voluntary pledges to reduce emissions made by more than 80 countries in Copenhagen will be a good start toward 2020. Stern told Dow Jones the pledges represented a "solemn commitment," which presumably carry more weight than New Year's resolutions. As for the US, its commitments, however solemn, may be subject to legal challenge.

China spelled out its terms in Durban for participating in a vague "legal document" after 2020, but only if industrial countries first agree to enforceable emission reductions under a second phase of the Kyoto Protocol.

While national interests can undercut noble sentiments about saving the planet from the ravages of climate change, presumably it is in everybody's national interest to do so. The Earth Negotiations Bulletin cited one delegate reflecting: "When we're locked away in rooms arguing, we need to remember that climate change affects peoples' lives."

The climate is not waiting for an Alexander to sever the Gordian Knot. A new report prepared by the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre and released in Durban warned of potentially atastrophic climate impacts if urgent action is not taken to limit global average temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Germany's Max Planck Institute of Meteorology recently reported that global greenhouse gas emissions would have to start declining by 2015 to keep atmospheric temperatures from increasing more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, to prevent irreversible impacts of climate change. Given the current pace of negotiations, global emissions will blow right past the so-called "tipping point" in 2015.

A 2010 Pentagon Defense Review noted: "While climate change alone does not cause conflict, it may act as an accelerant of instability or conflict."

Global warming skeptics scoff at the notion of a tipping point or that human activities in any way contribute significantly to natural global warming cycles. However, if most of the world's climate scientists are correct, the grim climate future they foresee, if not already manifested in intense storms, severe droughts, heat waves and floods, may be just over the horizon.--Gerald Karey in Washington

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