COP 16: The Cancun Betrayal

[the_future_modernes]

In December last year, the Cancun climate change conference took place. Its taken me this long to be able to write about it because I've been so pissed at the way so many stronger countries proceeded to be selfish shortsighted assholes and committed the entire planet to runaway climate change. Now that I can look at the issue without heading off into paroxyms of RAGE, here are the links:


THE BEGINNING:

April 2010 Native Peoples Reject Market Mechanisms

SAN JOSÉ, Apr 1, 2010 (IPS) - Solutions to global warming based on the logic of the market are a threat to the rights and way of life of indigenous peoples, the Latin American Indigenous Forum on Climate Change concluded this week in Costa Rica.

Proposals from governments and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs), such as the Clean Development Mechanism and the UN-REDD Programme (United Nations Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries), "are new forms of economic geopolitics" that endanger indigenous rights enshrined in treaties, says the final declaration of the forum, which ended Wednesday.MORE

OCt 15, 2010 Climate Talks Tank, Global South Sinks Further

The latest round of climate talks, in Tianjin, China, did nothing to break the stalemate of last year’s failed Copenhagen meeting—an outcome that was as predictable as it is maddening. The reality is that the most powerful delegates had nothing to lose from prolonging the standoff. But the one point of consensus, sadly, was a mutual disregard for the fate of millions of the world’s poorest people, who have the most to lose as the planet melts down.

The insular debate in Tianjin exposes the divide between the powerful states steering climate politics and the poor communities, concentrated in the Global South, at the front lines of the crisis. The gridlock also reflects a growing gulf within the so-called developing world between the have-nots and the have-lesses, as “emerging” economies like China and India diverge politically from the interests of poorer nations, even as they antagonize the wealthier nations that have long been the biggest emitters. While Chinese envoy Su Wei, invoking a Chinese idiom, likened the U.S. to “a pig preening itself in a mirror,” tiny island nations, indigenous peoples in South America, and farmers in drought-ravaged Kenya were out at sea, far from the inner sanctum of UN diplomacy.

Person for person, China and India are obviously poor countries compared to the countries that have historically churned out the bulk of cumulative emissions. But climate-justice activists point out that the developed-developing dichotomy doesn’t tell the whole story of the environmental injustice driving climate change. While the governments of relatively prosperous developing nations like Brazil and China have gained clout, the hardest-hit communities remain all but invisible.MORE

Lost in Cancun

Nature is sending a message that could not be more timely. Scattered around hotels, convention centres and camps located dozens of kilometres from each other, the climate change negotiators and activists who have come to the biggest annual meeting on the issue seem to have lost the nerve to pursue the initial goal of the talks that began 18 years ago.

That goal was a legally binding global treaty to drastically reduce the pollution that has unleashed climate change. Since the chances of reaching that objective by Dec. 10 are close to zero, the efforts are now heading in a different direction.

The talks, presentations and parallel activities are focusing on the money needed by poor countries, technical innovations and models for action that can be replicated. In short, a massive search for lifelines in an inevitable flood. MORE

Don't Look to South Africa for Leadership

JOHANNESBURG, Nov 29, 2010 (IPS) - South Africa is Africa’s largest economy and the continent's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. The country’s emissions per capita are on par with those of the United Kingdom, and more than twice as high as China’s emissions by the same measure.

South Africa is presently responsible for about half of Africa'’s emissions, with 80 percent of its estimated 400 million metric tonnes of CO2 coming from the energy sector alone.

Africa is expected to be disproportionately affected by climate change, with a global rise of two degrees Celsius - the acknowledged worldwide target - resulting in a possible four to five degree rise in many parts of the continent. Changes in temperature, quantity and distribution of rainfall have enormous implications for farming, compounded by weak infrastructure and the vulnerability of impoverished populations.

But going into negotiations at the U.N. Climate Conference in Cancún, it is likely that South Africa will align itself with other big developing economies, advocating an approach that prioritises poverty alleviation over any binding commitment to reducing emissions. MORE

Because sending us headfirst into more extreme weather leading famine and death will be SO helpful with poverty alleviation.

UGANDA:Carbon Finance May Not Benefit Forest Communities

KAMPALA, Nov 30, 2010 (IPS) - Uganda has lost more than two million hectares of forest since 1990, mostly converted to farmland by a growing population of smallholders. Carbon finance through the REDD programme is often presented as one way to arrest this destruction, but only if the benefits clearly translate to the grassroots.

Almost a fifth of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide comes from the destruction of forests - second only to the energy sector. The idea behind REDD - reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation - is to give carbon stored in forests a financial value; financing the protection of forests in developing countries like Uganda with money raised from selling carbon stored in those trees to polluters in the developed world.

Finalising details is expected to be one of the major tasks of the U.N. Climate Conference taking place in Cancun, Mexico beginning on Nov. 29. One of the many challenges in actually implementing REDD - now REDD+, which extends the concept to conservation and sustainable management of forests - is the meaningful involvement of forest-dependent people. MORE

WikiLeaks: US Manipulated Climate Agreement

Hidden behind the save-the-world rhetoric of the global climate change negotiations lies the mucky realpolitik: money and threats buy political support; spying and cyberwarfare are used to seek out leverage.

The US diplomatic cables reveal how the US seeks dirt on nations opposed to its approach to tackling global warming; how financial and other aid is used by countries to gain political backing; how distrust, broken promises and creative accounting dog negotiations; and how the US mounted a secret global diplomatic offensive to overwhelm opposition to the controversial "Copenhagen accord", the unofficial document that emerged from the ruins of the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009.MORE

DURING THE SUMMIT

Grassroots Global Justice Alliance Full Coverage

Alan Lissner's Cancun Photo and Video Montage

Groups Protest U.N. Climate Summit for Shutting out Civil Society

Cancún Betrayal: UNFCCC Unmasked as WTO of the Sky - IEN Statement on COP16 Outcome

GRASSROOTS CLIMATE JUSTICE IN CANCUN PART I

GRASSROOTS CLIMATE JUSTICE IN CANCUN PART II MORE articles at the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance Page

MIGRANT DIARIES BLOGPOSTS
CJ from the USA

NNIRR is part of the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance (GGJ) and Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) delegation of grassroots groups from the US participating in events in and around the COP 16. We're also a part of a larger strategic alliance of grassroots and allied organizations from North America actively engaged in organizing for Climate Justice, called the Grassroots Solutions for Climate Justice - North America or as some of us prefer to call it "CJ in the USA." Checkout the Press Release from our delegation about grassroots folks bringing climate justice solutions to Cancun.

Cop 16 runs from November 30 - December 10, 2010. Our broader delegation is engaged in an "inside-outside" strategy with trying to negotiate in key spaces within the COP as well as organizing various actions to highlight pressing issues, while engaging in the various alternative and civil society spaces outside the COP to exert strong pressure on it. (For a taste of the actions so far, checkout GJEP's Photo Essay 1 and Photo Essay 2.)MORE

For Life, Environment & Justice

The international farmers' movement, La Via Campesina (LVC) began its Global Forum for Life, Environment and Social Justice this past weekend with a dynamic march through downtown Cancun and a series of plenaries denouncing the carbon markets that governments are trying to legitimize in their negotiations at COP 16 (see previous post.)

Its unique, welcoming and fun-filled camp is juxtaposed against the seriousness and sense of urgency felt in its actions, plenaries and other discussions.

NNIRR was fortunate to be invited to present on a plenary at the forum this evening on migration.

Alongside speakers from the Farmworkers Association of Florida, the Border Agricultural Workers Project (BAWP) and the Mouvement Paysan de Papaye (Peasant Movement of Papaya) from Haiti, the forces displacing communities and the critical conditions facing migrants were raised. In particular, we highlighted how the dominant capitalist economic agenda has concentrated wealth in a few elites, while exposing communities (especially rural and peasant ones) to exploitation and criminalization.
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Closing out COP 16, Closing out Migrant Diaries

The day of action on Tuesday promised to be a challenging day and it proved to be that and more. Choosing to join the La Via Campesina mobilization, we began with a march around downtown Cancun. Then we were bussed and dropped off along the highway leading to Cancunmesse and ultimately the Moon Palace, where COP 16 was taking place.

The long and arduous march along the highway underneath the might of the glaring afternoon sun, was enlivened by the spirit of the thousands who chose to forsake comfort and safety, to challenge what the COP 16 stood for. For a glimpse into this powerful march, watch this short clip of Jasmine Thomas from IEN, inspiring our delegation with a moving rendition of an indigenous song while drumming:MORE

Dispatch From Cancun: Developing Paradise in the Suicide Capital If you have triggers, you might want to skip this one.

“There are people who live and vacation on that side of paradise,” says Evelyn Parra, one of Mexico’s leading suicidologas and the director of psychological services for the city’s family development agency. “And then there are those who work on that side of paradise—and live on this side,” she adds, pointing outside her office to the small, sweltering room crowded with people waiting for appointments.

Asked about popular explanations for the city’s high suicide rate, Parra looks up at the fast-growing lists of recent suicides and attempted suicides pinned on a wall next to her desk. She smiles and responds, “Oh yes, the Mayan goddess stories. Yes, we hear this story a lot. In history there may have been a goddess of suicide and Mayans did consider suicide an honor, but there is no cult now. The reasons for suicide are not just cultural but economic, personal and very complex. And it’s not the Mayans killing themselves. It’s migrants, poor people who came here for their dreams.”MORE

Battle in Cancun:The Fight for Climate Justice in the Streets, Encampments and Halls of Power

For the past two weeks in Cancun, Mexico parallel conferences on climate change have taken place. One gathered behind closed doors and police barricades in a luxury beach side resort. The others met in downtown Cancun bringing together members of civil society, indigenous communities, environmental groups and campesinos from all over the world in encampments of shared food, housing and informational forums.

Over the past 15 years we have become accustomed to this scenario – where the powerful leaders of the world pay little attention to those representatives of social movements and civil society whom they allow inside their meetings and those that clamor at their doors demanding justice. Not surprisingly the COP 16 ended as many of these conferences do, with the signing of a non-binding agreement guaranteeing market-based solutions to climate change and a complete disregard for human and indigenous rights.

While world leaders and mainstream environmental movements are declaring the meeting a victory, social movements have declared this agreement a complete failure. Bolivia, as the one dissenting voice to the final agreement, says they will file a complaint with the International Court of Justice in The Hague against the text approved in Cancun.MORE

Protesters Say "No" to Climate Market in Cancun

The short-cuts that the United Nations system is offering companies to profit from strategies against global warming were the target of loud protests on the Day of Action for Climate Justice.

Two separate demonstrations, of thousands of people each, were held Tuesday as the climate change summit that ends Friday in the southeastern Mexican resort town of Cancún enters the final stretch.

One of the protesters’ slogans, "País petrolero, el pueblo sin dinero" (In this oil-producing country, people have no money), referring to Mexico, underscored the main cause of the heating up of the planet: the burning of fossil fuels, a question that has been practically sidelined in the talks at the 16th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP16). MORE

UN's Tiniest Nation: "Help! We're Drowning"

It's safe to say that many Americans have never heard of Nauru, the Micronesian island in the South Pacific. It's the smallest member of the United Nations, constituting just 8.1 square miles with 10,000 citizens. It's also one of the low-lying islands already facing direct threats from the warming planet.

Residents of Nauru face very specific challenges. Germany claimed the island as a colony in the late 19th century. In the early 20th century, the Nauru became a hotbed for phosphate mining, with foreign companies extracting its vast deposits. The mining left a legacy of pollution, contaminating 70 percent of the island and leaving it uninhabitable. The country won independence in 1968 and bought back the phosphate industry in 1970, but the toxic bequeathal means the entire population lives at the edge of the land, just a few meters above sea level.

This leaves the residents at particular risk as the sea creeps slowly upward.MORE

Q&A
"Create a Protocol Based on Non-Emissions"
Emilio Godoy interviews YOLANDA KAKABADSE, president of WWF *

CANCÚN, Mexico, Dec 9, 2010 (IPS/TerraViva) - Latin America should create regional conventions to protect biodiversity and combat the impacts of climate change, according to Ecuadorian environmentalist Yolanda Kakabadse, president of the World Wild Fund for Nature International (WWF).

Climate agreements should be centred on eliminating polluting emissions, and not just reducing them or mitigating their effects, said Kakabadse, an activist who served as environment minister in Ecuador from 1998 to 2000.

She sat down with TerraViva in the southeastern Mexican city of Cancún, where she is attending the 16th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP16), which wraps up on Friday. MORE

CLIMATE CHANGE
New Forest Agreement - REDD Hot Issue at Cancún

CANCÚN, Mexico, Dec 3, 2010 (IPS/TerraViva) - A large number of social organisations are not pleased with the international convention on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) being negotiated at the COP16 climate summit.

"Our concern is that the agreement will fail to recognise the rights of indigenous peoples, and we want it to include our right to be consulted," native Panamanian Marcial Arias, secretary general of the Foundation for the Promotion of Indigenous Knowledge (FPCI), told TerraViva.

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Dozens of academic and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from around the world are opposed to the approval of the new global mechanism, dubbed REDD+, to curb deforestation, because of fears that it would exacerbate the dispossession of indigenous communities and theft of genetic material from the forests, and become a lucrative business for the most polluting companies. MORE

THE AFTERMATH


La Via Campesina Statement on Cancun: The people hold thousands of solutions in their hands

Climate Capitalism Won at Cancun: Everyone else loses


Cancun Climate Breakthrough

It's not perfect, and it's not binding, but international climate negotiators have struck a deal.
The final hours in Cancun were a world of difference from the closing night of the Copenhagen climate talks. Last year's summit closed with drama, confusion, and plenty of unhappy delegations, but the Mexico conference came to an end with multiple standing ovations for the host country and widespread agreement among countries to approve the text of an agreement.

It was after 3 a.m. when the parties adopted the two agreements—one that delays a decision on the future of the Kyoto Protocol and another laying out in more detail a new agreement on climate that includes major emitters like the US and China. Of the 194 countries represented in Cancun, 193 backed the text—which, while it falls short on many fronts, represented "a new era in international cooperation on climate change," said Patricia Espinosa, the minister of foreign affairs for Mexico and president of the summit. Much of what is included in the 32-page agreement for a new climate agreement is based on the spare Copenhagen Accord, formalizing it within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

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More thoughts on Cancun

The Cancun agreements also leave some of the thorniest questions about the legal status of international climate deals unanswered. Whether industrialized nations will extend the life of the Kyoto Protocol (excluding, of course, the US, which never ratified it) was a major subject of disagreement at COP16. Japan and Russia said no way, while developing nations have stood firm that dropping the only legally binding instrument to curb emissions would be a deal-breaker for them. There was really no resolution on that issue in Cancun; instead, it was punted to next year's meeting in Durban, South Africa—even closer to the looming 2012 expiration date for the first commitment period for Kyoto. The debate probably isn't going to get any easier in the next 12 months.

I think Sivan Kartha of the Stockholm Environment Institute put it best when he noted that it's not yet clear whether the one-year delay will serve as "a lifeline or a noose" for Kyoto. Unless something changes significantly in the next year, it sure looks to me like the latter. This is largely because there's no real sense yet of where the separate track of negotiations, the one that would bring the US and China, into an agreement is heading in terms of its legal form. As many times as US climate envoy Todd Stern has insisted that the US doesn't have a say on Kyoto, it really does—if only because the tension around it is the fact that there's very little faith globally that the US is going to pass a new domestic climate law and/or ratify a treaty for at least another two years (if ever). So until the legal path of a new agreement takes shape, the fate of Kyoto will continue to plague negotiators.MORE

Cancun Calamity:The agreement reached at the Cancún climate talks was actually a step backwards, writes Nick Buxton

Bolivia’s indefatigable negotiator, Pablo Solon, put it most cogently in the concluding plenary, when he said that the only way to assess whether the agreement had any ‘clothes’ was to see if it included firm commitments to reduce emissions and whether it was enough to prevent catastrophic climate change. The troubling reality, as he pointed out, is that the agreement merely confirms the completely inadequate voluntary pledges of reductions of 13-16 per cent by 2020 made since Copenhagen’s talks. Analysts at Climate Action Tracker have revealed that these paltry offers are nowhere near enough to keep temperature increases even within the contested goal of 2 degrees. Instead they would lead to increases in temperature of between 3 and 4 degrees, a level considered by scientists as highly dangerous for the vast majority of the planet. Solon said, “I can not in all in consciousness sign such as a document as millions of people will die as a result.”

To a stony silence from fellow country negotiators, Solon also pointed out a whole range of critical flaws in the agreement from its complete lack of specifics on key issues of finance to its systematic exclusion of voices from developing countries. As a press statement from Bolivia put it: “Proposals by powerful countries like the US were sacrosanct, while ours were disposable. Compromise was always at the expense of the victims, rather than the culprits of climate change.” Solon concluded that in substance the Cancún text was little more than a rehashed version of the Copenhagen Accord, that had been widely condemned the year before. Patricia Espinosa, chair of the talks, refused to open up any points of her draft text for negotiation and cheered on by other delegates made the legally dubious ruling that Bolivia’s opposition did not block consensus. The Cancún agreements were ‘approved’ to great celebration from the international community.
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Emissions punted to Durban, breakthroughs seen on Forests

Late Friday night in the hallways, the mood was surprisingly upbeat. Not only had the talks not collapsed, there was formal agreement on a number of issues. These included acknowledgement that emissions cuts needed to be in line with the science ­ 25 to 40 percent cuts by 2020 - and the global temperature rise target should be kept below two degrees C instead of at two degrees C as the target in the Copenhagen Accord.

However, Japan, Canada, the United States and Russia successfully undermined any binding agreement on how to reach those targets by lobbying to abandon the Kyoto Protocol and replacing it with a weak pledge and review system as proposed in the Copenhagen Accord, according to Friends of the Earth International (FOEI). Current pledges under the accord translate into global temperature rises of three to five degrees C by most analyses.

"The agreement reached here is wholly inadequate and could lead to catastrophic climate change," said Nnimmo Bassey, FOEI chair. Bassey is this year's winner of the Right Livelihood Award - the 'alternative Nobel Prize' - for "revealing the full ecological and human horrors of oil production" in Nigeria, his home country.

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Canada, Japan and Russia have declared they will not agree to a second Kyoto commitment. The U.S. refused to ratify the first Kyoto commitment and rejects the second as well. Those positions nearly derailed the talks since developing countries have long insisted rich countries agree to binding reductions under Kyoto. Agreeing to disagree, the final fight for Kyoto has been punted to Durban.

A Green Climate Fund was also agreed to with a $100-billion commitment by 2020, with a re-commitment of $30 billion by 2012 to help developing countries reduce their emissions and adapt to impacts of climate change. The fund will be managed by a board with equal representation from developed and developing countries with funding channeled through the World Bank for the first three years.

Tropical forest protection may be the big breakthrough coming out of Cancún. Delegates adopted a decision that establishes a three-phase process for tropical countries to reduce deforestation and receive compensation from developed countries, and it includes protections for forest peoples and biodiversity. Deforestation presently contributes 15 to 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. MORE

The Cancun Climate Pact Is Not a Victory for Climate Justice

From a climate justice standpoint, the deal lost credibility once it was tainted with REDD, a supposed anti-deforestation initiative that indigenous communities have long decried as an assault on native people’s sovereignty and way of life. Bolivia’s Evo Morales, representing the lone country at Cancun that rejected the final document, warned the plan would blaze new trails for industry’s destruction of precious forests. The driving principle of REDD, to deter deforestation under a market scheme in which businesses buy the “right” to pollute, strikes many indigenous activists as a blank check for the commodification of critical habitats under the guise of conservation.

An official statement from Bolivia reads the Cancun deal as the codification of institutional betrayal:

A so-called victory for multilateralism is really a victory for the rich nations who bullied and cajoled other nations into accepting a deal on their terms. The richest nations offered us nothing new in terms of emission reductions or financing, and instead sought at every stage to backtrack on existing commitments, and include every loophole possible to reduce their obligation to act.

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According to a study by UNFairPlay, the very people who have the most at stake in the climate debate were the least represented in Cancun. From the beginning, those participating in the negotiations were insiders and influence brokers, while the groups locked out were the impoverished nations who are marginalized ecologically and socially: islanders fearing sea level rise, farmers ravaged by floods in South Asia, refugees of wars in places like Sudan, motivated by the growing scarcity of land and water resources. The Guardian reported, “For every 100 [million] people living in Africa there are three negotiators—the equivalent figure for the EU is 6.4.” Moreover, the report suggested that delegates from small poorer nations who did attend the event may have been effectively silenced by inadequate technical support and translation services.

Activists reported throughout the conference that they were systematically blockaded and shut out of the negotiations. As with Copenhagen, the talks were not so much about what was said than what was not—the perspectives that never broke through to the inside network of negotiators. From the Global Justice Ecology Project:

Activists and representatives from civil society have been systematically excluded from the meetings and even expelled from the UNFCCC itself. When voices have been raised in Cancun, badges have been stripped. … Youth delegates were barred for spontaneously taking action against a permitting process for protests made unwieldy and inaccessible. NGO delegates were banned from the Moon Palace simply for filming these protests.

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Three months later: AFRICA: Anxious Eyes on Green Climate Fund

JOHANNESBURG, Mar 18, 2011 (IPS) - The African Development Bank says it is concerned about administrative delays holding up progress on the Green Climate Fund - one of the most significant achievements from the Cancún climate talks.

"We are very frustrated by the slow progress in setting up the structures to deliberate on the Climate Fund," said Donald Kaberuka, Executive Director of the regional Bank. "But I hope that we can catch up quickly, and we hope that the Committee can listen to African grievances, African concerns," he added. MORE

Twenty Years to Save Coral Reefs

WASHINGTON, Feb 23, 2011 (IPS) - In less than two decades, all of the world's coral reefs will be threatened if global climate change and local pressures like overfishing and pollution remain unaddressed, disproportionately impacting the livelihoods of some of the world's most impoverished people, a report warned Wednesday.

"[T]hreats to reefs not only endanger ecosystems and species, but also directly threaten the communities and nations that depend upon them," stated the 114-page publication, called 'Reefs at Risk Revisited', which was released by the Washington-based World Resources Institute and a coalition of over 25 likeminded organisations.

According to the report, most of the inhabited areas in close proximity to coral reefs are located in developing countries, while many communities that depend on these reefs for food and work are in poverty. MORE