Balancing climate and development needs

International negotiations are underway to draft a global agreement governing action against climate change in the period after 2012. There is consensus in the international arena on a number of issues linked to climate change, such as the urgent need to set clear targets in the short, medium and long term for the specific level of concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The real challenge lies in finding answers to questions such as: How can we establish a fair system and enforce and monitor it? This is by no means an easy task and we have less than a month left to reach an agreement before the climate change summit in Copenhagen in December. Of course there will be an agreement at Copenhagen, but will it be the agreement we aspire for?

Any agreement reached in Copenhagen must balance climate and development imperatives, mitigation and adaptation, and it must be supported by adequate means of implementation.

Very little progress was achieved in Bangkok last month or in Barcelona this month and this indicates that the governments will not be able to achieve a strong agreement at the end of the year.

EU position

EU officials have prepared a position paper for the Copenhagen climate change conference. The policy paper, adopted on September 10, presents a blueprint for raising international finance to help developing countries combat climate change. It recognises that the financing issue is central to prospects for reaching an ambitious agreement in Copenhagen.

On October 29-30, EU heads of state and government met in Brussels to define negotiation tactics and the final position concerning the amount of funds that could be allocated to combat climate change. Eventually, the discussions resulted in a text, which includes the following essential elements:

On the positive side, the EU member nations agreed that $148 billion (Dh544.3 billion) would be required annually by 2020 to help developing countries. Before 2020 however, the EU said that $7.4 billion to $10.4 billion would be needed annually to fund the developing nations' efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions. The bad news is that the EU said that members would contribute their "fair share to this goal on a voluntary basis." The EU conditioned this contribution on the US and other major nations doing their part.

Barcelona talks

The discussions in Barcelona did not result in any forward movement and developed and developing countries appeared to hold opposing views on whether common mitigation frameworks should be discussed at all. In fact, the Barcelona talks seemed to result in the same inaction and disappointment as the previous Bangkok discussions, and this has left low expectations for Copenhagen.

In Barcelona, although more than 100 countries are asking developed countries to reduce their emissions by at least 40 per cent by 2020 compared to 1990 levels, the accumulative pledges by developed countries so far do not exceed 17 per cent. Such levels of ambition will commit us to at least three degrees of warming, which will have devastating impacts on poor and vulnerable nations.

Many delegations believe that there is a lot of work that will have to be pushed beyond Copenhagen, and it is unlikely that a legally-binding agreement will be reached at the Climate Change Conference this December. Perhaps the international community will be able to reach a legally binding agreement sometime in 2010. It is also expected that US legislation is very unlikely to be passed in 2010, as it has to go through many committees. Maybe in two or three years the US can sign the new treaty.

A most worrying situation will arise if the international community is unable to reach an agreement to replace the current treaty even after Copenhagen. In that case we might have a period which is not governed by any treaty or any commitment; meanwhile, the world will keep on heating up.

No commitments

In fact, the Arab world still does not have a unified position on many of the issues raised in the negotiations such as carbon capture and sequestration, compensation of any lost income from oil and gas exports as a result of the treaty, and setting a commitment based upon per-capita GDP.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, the Arab world — whose member countries are classified as developing, or ‘Non-Annex 1' — does not have any commitments, making the current agreement one of the best and most developing country-friendly ever in history. Yet the Arab world has not been able to take advantage of its benefits.

The Arab world should do its best to mitigate emissions and be prepared to enhance its actions in return for additional financial, technological and capacity-building support from developed countries. In addition, it should push developed countries to have clear and binding reduction targets in the short, medium and long term. Giant developing emitters such as China and India should also have clear, binding reduction targets for the medium and long term, while other developing countries, such as those in the Arab world, should implement cuts voluntarily.

In regard to adaptation, the Arab world needs assistance to cope with the impact of climate change, such as floods, diseases and droughts. The Adaptation Fund is now operating within the secretariat of the Global Environment Facility of the World Bank. While the fund may be used to adapt to the current climate change impacts, this should not divert us from focusing on emission cuts. As of now, with the world failing to cut emissions successfully, many voices are calling for adaptation. Instead, mitigation should be the main focus, because adaptation has its limits. For confirmed impacts on developing countries, adaptation financing should be delivered as grants, not loans.

In the Arab region recently there has been a lot of political movement in regard to the current climate negotiations. Many Arab countries have been meeting in the past few days to build their own positions, and there was a meeting in Egypt on the Red Sea for Arab ministers to build a common Arab position.

The Arab countries should lobby other developing countries to take a united position focusing on technology transfer, mitigation and adaptation in the current international negotiations. Even if technology transfer is the only benefit that could come out of the Copenhagen Protocol, the Arab world should do everything possible to maximise this. Technology transfer on its own would be a real addition in line with the additionality concept which is at the heart of the current Kyoto Protocol. The oil-rich countries should be proactive in the current climate negotiations and not hold the mistaken belief that the oil trade will be affected.

Dr Mohammad Abdul Raouf is in charge of environment research at the Gulf Research Centre in Dubai.