Ninety-Nine magazine - October 2021

Broken promises and shifting goalposts

A history of the COP

Ever since the world agreed a fragile framework to tackle climate change in the 1990s, rich countries have been in denial about their responsibility for causing the problem, and what that means for how we deal with it, writes MEENA RAMAN.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report into the science of climate change has generated much ado about it being yet another wake-up call for the Earth’s future. Coming just two months ahead of COP26 in Glasgow, there is some hope that governments will finally act to reverse the course of rising greenhouse gas emissions, including by phasing out fossil fuels, and address the grave impacts of climate change.

For those who have been following the UN process of successive COPs for some time, such expectations are viewed as wishful, mainly due to the recalcitrant conduct of developed countries. Their history at COPs is one of broken promises and shifting the goalposts from what has been agreed to, and reinterpreting agreements to suit their corporate vested agendas.

But before the developing world takes the bait, it is vital that we recall the broken promises and false solutions that detract from the real action needed now to limit temperature rise to below 1.5C from pre-industrial levels.

ON THE BASIS OF EQUITY

Ever since it came into effect in 1994, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has acknowledged that developed countries have been responsible for “the largest share” of historical and current emissions, and that the share of global emissions from developing countries would need to “grow to meet their social and development needs”.

As a result, the Convention’s fundamental principle was that governments would protect the climate “on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities”. This meant that developed countries would “take the lead” in combating climate change and its effects and transfer finances and technology to developing countries to support mitigation and adaptation.

The Kyoto Protocol was enacted in 1997 to agree specific legally binding commitments within this framework. However, the first commitment period from 2008 to 2012 only saw developed countries (known as Annex 1 countries) sign up to aggregate emissions cuts of 5% compared to 1990 levels. Despite this very low ambition, the United States left the Protocol.

Efforts soon began for a post-2012 agreement that would get the US back on board, resulting in a big north-south battle at COP13 in Bali in 2007. The global north’s spin was that Kyoto expires in 2012 and a new treaty to replace it was needed. Their agenda was to get the US to commit to emissions cuts alongside cuts by developing countries, and to remove the link to the provision of finance and technology.

The global south insisted that Kyoto was not dead, and what was needed was agreement on the second Kyoto commitment period. This meant a top-down aggregate target for developed countries of at least 25- 40% cuts from 1990 levels by 2020. Yet the final Bali outcomes made no such commitment, following opposition mainly from the US.

Instead, in return for agreement on the second Kyoto period at Bali, a comprehensive process was launched to enable the full implementation of the Convention up to and beyond 2012. This was actually the precursor to the eventual Paris Agreement that was adopted in 2015.

FROM TARGETS TO PLEDGES

After Bali, a new ‘pledge and review’ system was introduced at COP16 in Cancun in 2010. This became the precursor to the nationally determined contributions (NDCs) of the Paris Agreement, where all governments can pledge what reductions they can undertake, without a reference to an international target or approach.

Countries like India, Bolivia, Ethiopia and others advanced the idea of ‘equitable access to atmospheric space’ in the negotiations. This proposed a fairer allocation of the remaining global carbon budget under a temperature limit, taking into account countries’ historical and cumulative emissions, including on a per capita basis. But again, these equity-based proposals never saw the light of day, given the resistance of developed countries led especially by the US.

In the bottom-up ‘pledge and review’ world of the NDCs, there is bound to be an ‘emissions gap’ between what countries should do to limit temperature rise and what they nationally determine. Developed countries now call on all countries to plug the emissions gap, which turns the founding principle on its head to ‘common and shared responsibilities’, with no reference to historical responsibility or equity between the north and south.