ALL EYES ON BALI
The first two weeks of December are critical for the global climate, as negotiators meet in Bali, Indonesia, to flesh out a blueprint for a new legal instrument to protect the global climate. Getting all major players - and especially the largest emitters of carbon dioxide - onboard, will be key to a successful outcome.
For the first time, trade ministers will also be present, hosted by the Indonesian government at a separate event. Their task will be to look creatively at what the trade regime can do to support the effort to mitigate climate change, and to consider to what extent trade measures could be justified to achieve climate change goals.
Bali meeting to agree a roadmap for negotiations
Thousands of policymakers will be meeting under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) during the first two weeks of December - not to flesh out a detailed global plan for dealing with climate change - but to create a roadmap for how to get to the plan.
Global public opinion favours a deal, not least following the release of three comprehensive reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) detailing the role humans have played and continue to play in creating climate change, and the effects it will have on humans and the environment (see Bridges Trade BioRes, 11 May 2007, http://www.ictsd.org/biores/07-05-11/story5.htm). The latest IPCC report, a synthesis of the three previous ones, represents the culmination of IPCC Forth Assessment Report process. It was released on 17 November, and will serve as a direct input at Bali. The report notes that the "warming of the climate system is unequivocal" and that "concentrations of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, far exceed the natural range over the last 650,000 years." Under a business as usual scenario, global temperatures are set to rise sharply, hitting the poor and vulnerable disproportionately. This would also threaten the survival of unique ecosystems around the poles and at high altitude, and increase the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events.
The report stresses the need for rapid action: Emissions of greenhouse gases would have to peak by 2015 to limit global temperature rises to 2.0 to 2.4 Celsius over pre-industrial times, a strict goal adopted by the EU in order to avoid "dangerous" climate change.
A few days later, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) released its Human Development Report for 2007/2008, entitled "Fighting climate change: Human solidarity in a divided world." It detailed the enormous adaptations needs, spread out globally, to deal with climate change. In this fight, the disadvantaged were in a much weaker position, lacking the resources to deal with rising sea levels, floods, droughts, and storms. "Ultimately, climate change is a threat to humanity as a whole. But it is the poor, a constituency with no responsibility for the ecological debt we are running up, who face the immediate and most severe human costs," commented UNDP Administrator Kemal Dervi?.Country positions
Currently, countries have taken different approaches to dealing with climate change. The Kyoto Protocol, which most countries have singed on to, requires emissions cuts only of developed countries, in accordance with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. Only two developed countries have opted out of the Kyoto Protocol - the US and Australia. For a deal to be meaningful in the future, these countries need to get back into the process again.
Elections in Australia little more than a week before the Bali meeting ushered in the Labour Party, which has promised serious action on climate change - including ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. The Labour Prime Minister-elect Kevin Rudd has said he is planning to go to Bali for the UNFCCC meetings, and the country will be back in the Kyoto Process.
Meanwhile, emissions from emerging economies in particular are on the rise, and there have been calls for them to take on at least some form of targets. China, India and Brazil - some of the key emerging economies - have stressed that developed countries must lead the way. "China will play its due role and take its due part in the process of emission reduction, but we will absolutely not take on the commitment of taking on the same responsibilities and making the same commitments as the developed countries," Xie Zhenhua, who will head the Chinese delegation to Bali, told reporters.
The poorest and most vulnerable countries, which have done nothing to create the problem of climate change, will need to be helped to adapt to the effects of it. Therefore, an Adaptation Fund is set to be launched at Bali.
A key challenge for the negotiations in Bali will be to ensure that the current multiple tracks, focusing on mandatory cuts versus targets based on energy efficiency and voluntary efforts, are successfully merged into one comprehensive process.
Key issues on the table
Dealing with climate change is extremely complex, as it entails, in effect, dealing with the energy use that underpins most functions of society. Carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, is essentially a by-product of energy use and there are no easy fixes in sight. Energy efficiency and new and renewable energies will be important components on the plate of solutions. Increasingly, attention is also turning to land use practices - and ways to stop deforestation in particular - with expectations for Bali including a deal to account for this.
The global plan to address climate change will be composed of country and regional plans, which will be linked together, among other, through an international market for emissions reduction - a carbon market. The Kyoto Protocol, which was a first step in setting mandatory limits for carbon emissions, will expire in 2012, and a follow-up instrument is needed, not least to provide private sector actors with continuity and a clear operating environment on the way to a low-carbon future. Development of energy technology is expensive and time consuming, so the right investments need to be made immediately, without any lag time.
Trade ministers to do their share for the climate
In parallel with the UNFCCC meetings, Indonesia, the host country, has called for a meeting of selected trade ministers to think creatively about what cards they may hold to help forge an effective climate deal. Although some are reluctant to link the highly complex processes to each other - especially seeing the lack of momentum in the Doha Round - the trade world does contain some potential carrots and sticks for the climate talks.
Energy efficient goods, renewable energy technologies, biofuels and technologies such as carbon capture and storage need to be available globally at vastly increased quantities. One way to facilitate this global spread of new technologies is through the Doha Round negotiations on lowering tariffs on environmental goods and services. This could be a crosslink and potential deliverable from the trade system discussed at Bali. Additionally, some have called for flexibility in the global intellectual property system, allowing for more rapid engineering in all parts of the world of climate friendly technology - also something that potentially could be discussed within the trade system.
Meanwhile, as developed countries are preparing to implement tougher climate measures, which will affect their domestic energy prices and potentially the competitiveness of their traded products, some have called for price adjustments at the border when trading with countries that have not implemented climate measures. This would, they say, both level the playing field for their goods and encourage countries with a laxer approach to climate mitigation to get onboard.
US Trade Representative Susan Schwab, as well as trade ministers from Argentina, China, France, India, South Africa, and the UK are reportedly going to attend the Bali meeting. Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim is also slated to go, as is David O’Sullivan, the European Commission’s Director-General for trade. According to some sources, WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy will also attend the discussion.
The carbon footprint of trade
More attention is also focusing on the nuts and bolts of the trading system, i.e. greenhouse gas emissions related to the physical transport of goods through marine shipping and aviation. This discussion opens up complex questions about the lifecycles of traded goods, international carbon footprints, ‘food miles’ vs ‘fair miles’ and the concept of embodied carbon, challenging global carbon accounting systems currently based on the nation state. According to a recent study, as much as a quarter of China’s carbon emissions can be directly linked to goods that are consumed in other countries. If some regions have become the factories of the world, who and how should responsibility for carbon emissions be shared?
Additional resources
To access the IPCC Forth Assessment Synthesis Report Summary for Policymakers, visit http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf
To access the UNDP Human Development Report 2007/2008, visit http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr2007-2008/
For daily updates from the UNFCCC meeting in Bali, see IISD’s Earth Negotiations Bulletin at http://www.iisd.ca/climate/cop13/
ICTSD reporting; "UN Panel Lays Out Risks, Solutions to Warming," REUTERS, 28 November 2007; "Rich Nations Should Do More on Climate Change - China," REUTERS, 28 November 2007; "Climate Change Traps World’s Poorest," ENS, 27 November 2007; "Ahead of climate meeting, China says developed world bears emission reduction burden," AP, 29 November 2007.