Beyond the Durban Climate Talks

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Snapshot

How Much Did the Climate Talks in Durban Accomplish?

Ruth Greenspan Bell and Barry Blechman

Climate negotiators are celebrating the deal reached over the weekend at the conference in South Africa. But the agreement only validates an approach to climate change that has failed to reverse global warming for more than 20 years now.

Four years ago, the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change called evidence for the warming of the climate system "unequivocal." More recently, scientists at MIT calculated that business-as-usual emissions portend a 50 percent chance that the earth's average surface temperature will increase at least 9.2 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. Yet negotiations to find a global solution to this problem, primarily under the umbrella of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process, have yielded little. The last two annual sessions (called Conferences of the Parties, or COPs) agreed on vague generalities but essentially postponed resolving disputed details. Even the biggest boosters of the process hold out little hope for concrete achievements at the next COP in Durban, South Africa, which will begin late November.

UNFCCC negotiations involve a bigger basket of issues than most multinational talks -- including weaning whole economies off coal and oil, protecting disappearing forests, saving the small island states that are likely to be underwater within a few decades, and managing all the related costs. They are also an inclusive process, involving 194 countries -- polluters, victims and everyone in-between -- all of which officially have equal weight in the proceedings. Given the urgency of the issue and the glacial pace of progress, there may be reason to consider alternatives."

The UNFCCC was created at the Earth Summit in 1992 in Rio, and entered into force in 1994. Developed countries were to "take the lead" in reducing their greenhouse gas emissions and provide support to help developing countries meet their economic development goals sustainably.

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol, rejected by the United States, put flesh on the UNFCCC's bones. Annex I countries -- industrialized countries that were OECD members in 1992, plus former Soviet bloc economies in transition -- agreed to emissions reduction targets. Developing countries (non-Annex I nations) -- China and India, for example -- were held to more limited obligations. And all were allowed to meet their targets in any way they wanted.

Neither the Kyoto commitments nor Kyoto's market-based pollution trading tools halted total global emission growth. China and India became leading contributors to the problem. The recent economic recession put a dent in emissions growth in the United States and Europe, but this will likely reverse as fortunes rise. And, some of the progress that Europeans claimed toward meeting the Kyoto goals came from shuttering inefficient industries in the former Soviet bloc, which was a one-time gain. For its part, the United States continued to increase its emissions and has been unable to resolve the internal political differences that have prevented tougher climate regulation.

The 2009 COP might have been a chance to start anew. For the first time, a climate conference attracted world leaders, who were able to conclude an accord to hold global temperature within two degrees Celsius and create a system of voluntary reduction pledges. This angered many NGOs and countries that had wanted a binding resolution. A year later, negotiators at the Cancun COP agreed to undertake activities that would build upon many of the Copenhagen elements, but the agreements were so vague that they essentially remain agendas for further discussions later.
The COP in Durban this fall will have to consider the future of the Kyoto Protocol, which by its own terms ends its "first commitment period" in 2012. It is also tasked with filling in the missing details from the previous rounds of negotiations and reconsidering the differentiation between Annex I and non-Annex I countries. And it must do all of this -- as in any negotiation under UN auspices -- under ground rules where any single nation might block the will of all the others.

This may sound nearly impossible, but climate negotiations are hardly the first time the world has tackled complex, multi-issue multinational challenges. The effort to control and reduce nuclear proliferation at first faced the same seemingly crippling dynamics, but, in the end, incremental progress in multiple negotiating arenas has stabilized the number of states possessing nuclear weapons, reduced the arsenals of the two nuclear superpowers, and greatly diminished the risk of accidental or inadvertent nuclear war. The lessons from these negotiations could be applied to managing the climate challenge.

Giving talks top-level attention, segmenting issues, and diversifying negotiating arenas all seem promising. In the 1950s, when governments were more concerned with the political and ideological struggle of the Cold War than the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe, "general and complete disarmament" was the stated goal, and negotiations took place strictly in the UN General Assembly, without any success at curbing the nuclear arms race, much less eliminating nuclear armaments.

Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, however, the seriousness and danger of the arms race became more concrete. Government officials began to discuss discrete nuclear issues and identified aspects on which they might find common ground. The first result was the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited nuclear testing in the atmosphere, in space, and under the seas. This ban did not spell the end of the nuclear problem, of course, but it at least mitigated the danger of radiation from nuclear tests and gave momentum to other negotiations.