The impact of the global financial crisis creates an illusion that there are real prospects for effective co-operation to reach long-term global goals. Despite China’s immaculate hosting of the Olympic Games and its inevitable rise to the global negotiation tables as a key decision-maker, reality forces her to come to terms with her own pressing issues such as maintaining an eight percent growth rate and increasing domestic consumption. Inasmuch as the Chinese government wants a louder voice in the global regimes, shouldering responsibility is not on the agenda.
The resulting accord of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) reflects what global, negotiated governance for co-operative action to reach long-term global goals entails. The Convention demonstrates typical barriers and complexities of building any form of global regime. What determines the pace of the negotiation process and the speed of reaching agreement is the immediacy of dangers in question. Even where dangers are immediate, politics is politics. The result of the two-week convention of leaders from 192 members is a reality check that environmental dangers are still not immediate enough to create any binding deal that obliges member states to contribute meaningfully. Anyone who expects more than this is just unrealistic.
At the end of the Copenhagen summit, there is no consensus, no shared vision for long-term co-operative action, including on emission reductions. In the words of the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the accord is a “beginning”—a start at building a foundation for intergovernmental efforts to tackle the challenge posed by climate change; a start that can last a long time.
The ratified Convention recognized that the climate system is a shared resource whose stability can be affected by industrial and other emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Under the Convention, governments are only expected to:
* gather and share information on greenhouse gas emissions, national policies and best practices;
* launch national strategies for addressing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to expected impacts, including the provision of financial and technological support to developing countries;
* co-operate in preparing for adaptation to the impacts of climate change.
The delegates passed a motion to “take note” of a deal that has no binding effect; an accord that lacked specific targets for reducing carbon emissions. Don’t forget that the Convention was set up to build the necessary framework to clarify what these targets are, as well as how and when these targets can be met. There has still been no real negotiation on targets for developed nations. Sessions have been held, yes, but all developed countries set their own targets before they arrived and stuck to them.
The attitude and the lack of sincerity of the leaders of China and the United States—the world’s two biggest greenhouse emitters, responsible for 40 percent of world emissions—were telling. They flew in at the end of the two-week convention, making it clear that they had nothing fair, effective and binding to offer. Their entourages just took over the agenda and emerged with what was basically their own private deal, announced on live television before others realized it had happened.
Under the confines of the UNFCCC, the so-called accord is an official recognition that there is the need to limit global temperatures rising no more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels. There is money pledged and a fund created. However, how predictable and sustainable are these financial resources remain somewhat murky as developed countries agree to “set a goal of mobilising jointly $100 billion a year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries.” The lesson here is that an accord based on a proposal tabled by a U.S.-led group of China, India, Brazil and South Africa is not global. The year 2009 is a mere essential beginning for any co-operative action to reach long-term global goals.
