Kicking the Can

In the Opening Plenary of the latest round of climate negotiations in Durban, South Africa, South Africa's president Jacob Zuma reiterated an increasingly ineffectual plea:

"For most people in the developing countries and Africa, climate change is a matter of life and death."

While few who understand the problem doubt the truth of this statement, the power it has to motivate political action has ebbed significantly in the years since Copenhagen. For many delegations the sense of urgency has all but disappeared. For both the European Union and the United States, success in Durban will be primarily defined by setting into motion some of the agreements made in principle last year in Cancun. In effect, this is settling on wallpaper before the house is built.

What can we expect from Durban?

Cancún Abridged

Last year in Copenhagen, despite high expectations for a political solution to control international levels of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGe), negotiations broke down and produced a weak general statement referred to as the Copenhagen Accord. On November 29, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) reconvened for the 16th time representatives from 193 countries to try again, this time in Cancún, Mexico. In all, over 11,000 people participated in the two week conference that was part high-level diplomatic negotiation, trade show, grass-roots appeals, and media circus. Among them were five observers representing the AAG. In the end, the Cancún Agreement formalized much of what was spelled out more broadly in the Copenhagen Accord a year earlier including national pledges for GHGe reductions from the world’s most developed economies, the creation of a Green Climate Fund to aid developing nations hit hardest by changing conditions, and provisions for the world’s rich to pay poorer countries to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD). The fate of the Kyoto Protocol remains unclear and has been deferred to next year’s meeting of the UNFCCC in Durban, South Africa.

The Death of Kyoto

Japan made headlines early last week when they came out and definitively stated that they would not support a continuation of the Kyoto Protocol. Based on what has happened up to this point in Cancun it may be time to formally declare the time of death for the Kyoto Protocol. This is especially worrisome to small island states and those countries that are considered most vulnerable to changing climactic conditions. The original Kyoto agreement was flawed from the beginning. The world's largest polluter at the time (the U.S.) never signed on to the agreement despite the fact that their negotiators helped to broker the deal. Many of the largest economies that did sign on, such as China and India, were not obligated to cuts because they were developing countries. The pledged emissions cuts were never seen as going far enough and there was no mechanism to generate any real pressure on countries who were not meeting their obligations under Kyoto.