Now is Not the Time to COP out of Climate Commitments
Since its creation in 1994, the United Nations Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has held annual Conference of Parties (COP) meetings to assess the progress in dealing with climate change.
28th November 2012 | Tom Warwick: Renewables Engineer, Rolton Group
This week sees the start of COP18, the latest of these often controversial international climate summits. 17,000 scientists, politicians and other delegates from 194 countries across the globe will converge on Doha in Qatar for the last conference before the end of the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol. This year’s conference; being held in a newly constructed, air conditioned conference centre the size of Gatwick airport, situated in the middle of a desert has been the centre of much controversy.
Qatar’s oil and gas sectors account for over half the country’s GDP, and elevated gas prices in recent years have seen Qatar overtake Liechtenstein and Luxembourg to become the world’s richest country per capita. This recent surge in economic growth has allowed the Qatari royal family to provide their citizens with free electricity and water. In a country with negligible fresh water reserves, all water has to be produced by energy intensive desalination plants; with this access to free power and man-made fresh water it comes as no surprise that the average Qatari uses more water and emits more carbon dioxide than a citizen from any other nation in the world. With all this in mind, most of the world is still sceptical to say the least with the choice of Qatar as the host for the latest climate change summit.
Regardless of its host nation, COP 18 was always going to be a hotly debated conference. Produced in 1997, the Kyoto Protocol entered into force in 2005 as the world’s first major international commitment to a reduction in Green House Gasses, and the first phase has been a bumpy ride with limited results. From the start a number of major emitters dragged their feet in ratifying the commitment, along the way many countries threatened to leave; in the end only Canada actually did so.
Progress was made despite the politics, particularly within the EU where many countries including the UK actually surpassed their reduction targets. Now the majority of the world’s nations are hoping that COP 18 will be able to facilitate the platform for an agreement to develop on these first phase reductions and provide a solid commitment for emission levels heading towards 2020.
Developing an agreement that is acceptable to all parties will be the challenge. The world is a different place now when compared with the world the Kyoto Protocol was drawn-up in. Most of the “Annex 1” developed nations who signed up to the 5.2% reduction in the first phase of the agreement are still deep in economic recession. To add to the complications, developing nations such as China and India have now overtaken the US, Europe and Russia to become Earth’s biggest polluters.
The US have signalled they will not sign up to any new treaty without ambitious binding commitments from the BASIC countries (Brazil, South Africa, India and China), who in turn last week announced that they would not sign a new regime that ditches the Kyoto Protocol’s central commitment to impose greater responsibility on industrialised countries. The argument on either side is clear.
In many ways COP 18 is a lot like splitting a restaurant bill between 194 people all speaking different languages. Very few of the 194 people were there for the starter, they had a main course and were half way through their second dessert before they began to realise that the prices on the menu didn’t include an additional hidden cost. By this time, the remainder of the 194 people had gradually turned up, there were a lot of them and they were all hungry. After a while nobody could remember what had been eaten, or agree on the true scale of the hidden cost. But most people agreed that somebody should start cutting down, just in case.
Seventeen conferences were held, and some progress was made. Unfortunately, the further entrenching of nations in the COP18 discussions mean that the most likely outcome will either be that nobody gets tighter targets, or that everybody does. The only thing currently holding the talks together is the consensus from all countries that something needs to be done.
COP 18 comes as we are nearing the end of what has been another record year for extreme climate phenomena. Delegates from nearly every nation represented at this year’s conference will have events from their own countries in the back of their mind during discussions. Brazil and China both saw their worst flooding in over 50 years. In the Philippines, rising sea levels and extreme rain flooded the capital of Manila, submerging 50% of the city.
Events weren’t limited to developing countries. During the summer months a huge heat wave extended from North America over the Arctic, causing sea ice to drop to its lowest ever recorded levels. The US has experienced the warmest 12 month period since records began with over 50% of counties classified as disaster areas. Russia and the Ukraine both suffered similar scale crop failures, pushing up global grain prices by 44% on the previous year.
This year economic damages caused by extreme weather events are at their highest ever level. The cost of climate change is starting to become apparent to individual nations; however, the problem is of a scale that can’t be solved by a single country or even a group of nations such as the EU. Climate change is a global issue and the only way to solve the issue is with a global effort. Creating, legislating, coordinating and enforcing this is a huge task that cannot be effective until a global consensus is reached.
It is very easy to by cynical and write COP 18 off before it starts. It will not be the last Conference of Parties; it also won’t be the greenest. However, there will be some extremely important decisions made over the next two weeks in Doha, decisions that will affect both world and UK energy policy through to the end of the decade.
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