U.S., Saudi Arabia obstinate as world moves ahead with Kyoto and threatened communities speak out

By Donald A. Brown, Director, the Pennsylvania Consortium For Interdisciplinary Environmental Policy

The tenth meeting of the Conference of Parties (COP-10) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was held in Buenos Aires during the first two weeks of December and was attended by over 6,000 participants. Despite COP-10 having a more modest agenda than some of the previous climate change COPs, several notable outcomes of Buenos Aires emerged.

First, because Russia ratified the Kyoto Protocol in November, the first treaty that requires most industrialized countries to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions will come into effect on February 16, 2005. The United States, the largest emitter of greenhouse GHGs, is sitting on the sidelines while most of the developed world is going ahead under the Kyoto agreement. COP-10 was the first meeting of the parties under the UNFCCC since it has become clear that most industrialized nations would move ahead on their commitments to reduce GHG emissions notwithstanding the U.S. rejection of Kyoto. Because of this, many anti-American remarks could be heard both in the over 100 side-events that took place and in the halls.
Under the Kyoto accord most of the industrialized countries have committed to reduce GHG emissions by an average of 5.2 percent below 1990 levels in a period between 2008 to 2012.

Fueling the already strong anti-American sentiments widely heard in Buenos Aries were reports that the U.S. delegation, along with Saudi Arabia, was acting as an obstructionist in the negotiations in a number of ways including in preventing meaningful discussion of post-Kyoto round negotiation issues, in trying to change negotiating texts such that the words "climate change" would be replaced by the term "climate variability", and employing delaying tactics.

Buenos Aires was also notable because communities that are particularly vulnerable to climate change and their representatives are beginning to passionately tell their story and demand action. For the first time in the international climate change negotiations, the Buenos Aires meeting agenda provided significant time for discussions about who should be responsible for climate change damages.

Those living in the Arctic are already seeing noticeable warming and will continue to experience greater warming than the global average because they live in a place that will see the greatest warming as the planet heats up. Other communities are at abnormally high risk because they are most likely to suffer the greatest adverse climate change impacts caused by rising oceans, more frequent droughts or floods, increases in vector borne disease, reductions in agricultural productivity, or increases in life-threatening heat waves. Because many of those most vulnerable to climate change are among the world's poorest people, those at greatest risk from climate change are least capable of spending money to pay for adaptation responses to climate change such as building dikes or irrigating crops threatened by drought.

At the Buenos Aires meeting, many residents of places most vulnerable to climate change made presentations about how their communities are already endangered. A former chief environmental official from Bangladesh frequently admonished the industrialized nations for doing too little to reduce climate change while rising seas are putting millions of his countrymen at grave danger from flooding. A sherpa from Nepal urged the international community to respond quickly to climate change because his community's very existence is being threatened by the disappearance of glaciers that his people have relied upon for centuries as a source of annual replenishment of drinking and agricultural water. A representative of the Arctic Inuit peoples wanted to know who was going to be responsible for the looming feeding crisis that his people are facing as animals that have traditionally served as their food supply are becoming more inaccessible as the Arctic sea ice disappears. A resident of an island off the cost of India demanded compensation for damages to his community caused both by flooding from rising seas and the loss of drinking water supplies as rising ocean salt water replaces fresh groundwater. These climate change victims are only the first to experience climate change caused damages that are sure to multiply in the years ahead. The Buenos Aires plan of action contained steps to be taken in future negotiations to consider climate change adaptation measures.

The Buenos Aires meeting was also notable because many side events discussed important post-Kyoto round negotiation issues. Now that Kyoto implementation is underway, and given that the commitments of industrialized nations specified in the Kyoto protocol were only ever understood to be a baby step in the direction of what will be needed to prevent catastrophic warming, there was considerable discussion in Buenos Aires on what future climate change negotiations need to achieve in post-Kyoto rounds.

Two extremely important elements of any adequate post-Kyoto round regime were discussed in some detail in Buenos Aires at several side events.

The first is the need for any future climate change regime to contain sufficiently strong commitments to prevent catastrophic warming. At minimum, any new agreement will need to assure that total global emissions, that is, not only emissions from developed nations, begin to decrease. This is becoming increasingly urgent given that there is a growing scientific consensus that is important to keep future warming below an additional two degrees Celsius to prevent dangerous interference with the climate system and that we are running out of time to limit global warming to this amount.

Secondly, any future regime will need to allocate emissions targets among all nations equitably. This is practically necessary to get developing nations to make commitments. It is widely believed that future climate regimes must be seen to be fair to developing nations in order to develop an urgently needed global consensus. There were several side events on what equity requires in future climate change regimes.

Finally, I chaired a meeting that developed the Buenos Aires Declaration on the Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change. This document set into motion a process that will expressly examine the ethical dimensions of climate change issues actually in contention in global climate change negotiations in the years ahead. This document begins with an explanation of why express global ethical reflection on concrete climate change issues is important and then identifies the major climate change issues around which such ethical reflection is most urgently needed. This document process is being sponsored by Pennsylvania Consortium for Interdisciplinary Environmental Policy, the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State University, IUCN Commission on Environmental Law-Ethics Working Group, The Center for Applied Ethics at Cardiff University, The Center For Global Ethics at Birmingham University, The Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research, EcoEquity, and Oxford University Climate Policy Institute.

Copies of the Buenos Aires Declaration on the Ethical Dimensions of Global warming can be obtained from brownd@state.pa.us.