Happenings in Bali
The Canadian NGOs – who are a core inspiration in the CAN meetings and among the truly glowing active people in the entirety of the conference – exposed a leaked federal document December 8th revealing the Harper government explicitly instructing the Canadian negotiators to demand that the poorer countries accept exactly the same binding absolute emission reduction targets as countries like Canada who have 10 times higher per capita emissions.
Harper is dismantling Canada’s credibility. Rajendra K. Pachauri – chair of the Nobel-Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change- said that Canada has a “government of skeptics” that “do not want to do anything on Climate Change “
This action violates the back bone–defining principle of the Kyoto Protocol, which is referred to as “common but differentiated responsibilities”, to reflect the historical responsibility and capacity for emission reductions.
If Harper and others like him are wrong, what approach could address climate change and global social justice at the same time?
I attended a workshop on Global Development Rights (GDR) that may provide exactly such a framework. The premise for GDR is that “the world’s wealthy minority has left so little atmospheric space for the poor majority, that even if industrialized country emissions were to be suddenly and magically halted, the dramatic emission reductions demanded by the climate crisis would require the developing countries to urgently decarbonizes their economies, and to do so while they are still combating endemic poverty.”
This is not only the core of the physical challenge, but also the crux of the international political impasse that now stymies the negotiations.
What the GDR framework does, is not only acknowledge the right to develop for the Southern countries, but it places that principle at its structural core. It seeks to secure for developing nations a viable portion of what GDR authors call the “scant remaining atmospheric space” and secures for them the right to prosper in it. It does so by codifying this right to develop in terms of a development threshold, below which individuals are not required to help shoulder the burden of solving the climate problem – in effect defining a basic threshold of both “survival income” and “survival emissions”.
People above this threshold – like most Canadians and others in the developed world, are taken as having already realized their right to develop – and thus they must share the burden, not only for reducing their own countries’ emissions, but playing a meaningful role in reducing the emissions in others who can not otherwise afford it.
This is exactly what the UNFCC’s principle of “common but differentiated responsibility and respective capabilities” means in practice.
The GDR have actually developed mathematical projections of just how much of the global emission reduction burden various countries and others share – the US, not surprisingly, has about 1/3 of the global burden, the EU about 1/4 and China about 8%..
Assuming the political will on the part of the more developed countries – including Canada – to take on their rightful responsibilities under this kind of formulation, what kind of Climate regime do we need, especially in the South?
1. Ensure mitigation consistent with emergency climate stabilization program globally
2. Enable the depth and extent of adaptation inevitably needed
3. Safeguard the right to develop to a healthy lifestyle
As part of this examination of the burden from North to South, we also need to confront the exportation of dirty industries – and their emissions - to developing countries, and we must ask who should bear the responsibility for reducing the emissions associated with production when well-off “First Worlders” buy cheaper products produced overseas in environmentally destructive manner?
How does our Green principle of true cost pricing apply here, when we are trying to truly incorporate the cost of global health? And how do issues of social justice in trade get included? For example, do we help to fund cleaner production processes in export-dependent Southern countries, in order to preserve jobs there? Or is it better to “re-localize” production in Northern counties, cutting down on transport and keeping the investment in more environmental technology closer to home?
Lastly, we need to incorporate the fact that in 2050 our world will be a different place because of our rapid change in development, the climate, economies, power and state of the environment. Forecasting the targets and making these assumptions is building on a source of uncertainty – yet one that we cannot avoid.
Speaking of another climate change uncertainty, panelist Mohamed Adow from Kenya concluded with a very clear and unique statement. “You will never know which cut will bring down the tree, so every cut counts for everything.” In our interconnected world, we need to stop cutting the tree, from all angles.
And speaking of trees, another concept being discussed by the North and South is trying to keep the carbon stored in the forests from being released, there has been specific discussion concerning the reduction of emissions from Deforestation in Developing Countries - REDD (unfccc.int/resource/docs/2007/smsn/ngo/007.pdf). According to ForestEthics Canada, British Columbia alone can store 18 billion tones of carbon, yet annual logging releases 51.6 million tones of CO2, more than half that released by all light-duty cars, trucks and motorcycles every year in Canada (96 million tones). So let’s start by cutting the logging here at home!
