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The UN Climate Conference in Poznan failed to achieve any breakthrough towards a global climate deal - a sign not merely of bad timing, but of a fundamentally flawed system that takes no account of climate justice, argues Oscar Reyes.

17th December 08 - Oscar Reyes, Transnational Institute

Eleven thousand delegates (including 1,500 corporate lobbyists), 13,000 tonnes of carbon consumed, and two weeks wasted: the UN Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland made only glacial progress towards a new global climate treaty, due to be signed a year from now in Copenhagen.

“It´s going to take at least a riot to make any difference to the extraordinarily slow progress” joked Henry Derwent, CEO of the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) at one side event in the conference venue. If things carry on at this pace, he should be careful what he wishes for.

From binding global emissions targets to the limits of the carbon market, none of the main issues tabled at Poznan were resolved – and the more pressing discussion on how to leave fossil fuels in the ground went entirely untouched.

The “biggest achievement of Poznan,” according to Poland's environment minister Maciej Nowicki, who chaired the talks, was the start of the UN´s Adaptation Fund, which is designed to help the poorest countries tackle the severe effects of climate change that they are already experiencing.

But it is hard to spin this failure as a success. With financial bailouts currently running into the trillions, the Fund´s starting figure of $80 million a year is derisory – even the UN´s own modest calculations talk of $28-67 billion per year needed for adaptation by 2030.

The most optimistic interpretation that can be put on the Poznan conference was that the timing was bad. While delegates there were talking themselves to a standstill, French President Nicolas Sarkozy (who currently holds the EU Presidency) was ratcheting up air miles in a mission to agree a watered down EU climate policy. The US sent a lame duck delegation to Poznan with a mandate to agree nothing.

Other industrialised countries followed suit. Canada loudly made excuses – variously ´waiting´ for the USA, China, India and Brazil to act – but was silent on its rush to exploit the Alberta Tar Sands, arguably the most environmentally destructive source of energy on the planet. Japan, meanwhile, provided a comic turn when its lead delegate explained his country´s commitment to technological innovation in terms of his own personal commitment to reduce his number of weekend showers from eight to three.

Deeper reasons than just timing explain the failure at Poznan, though. The current pattern of each country or bloc waiting for the others to show its hand will not continue indefinitely, but the tendency to treat climate talks as trade negotiations is unlikely to change. Moreover, there remain a series of fundamental problems that are extremely unlikely to be addressed at Copenhagen.

One of the most basic stumbling blocks is intrinsic to the UN negotiating process itself – where the intergovernmental bias pits one country or bloc against another, with each defending a conception of ´national interest´ that reflects elite class interests above the needs of the whole population.

In Poznan, this meant that Indigenous Peoples and forest communities were shut out of discussions on deforestation – and continue to be denied any status parties to the negotiation – even as negotiators discussed how to commodify their land in the form of ´forest carbon´.

The flip side of the same coin is that the corporate influence on the talks grows stronger by the year. The largest non-governmental organisation at Poznan was IETA, while roughly half of the event space within the conference grounds was ´privatised´ (see climatecrashers.blogspot.com). The result is that public interest organisations are being squeezed, even as corporations are courted with their own ´Business Day´ offering privileged access to negotiators, senior officials and ministers.

The issue is not simply one of who negotiates or has access, however, but of how those discussions are framed. Instead of seeing climate change as a cross-cutting issue, negotiations are parceled up into obscure sub-committees of sub-committees, which then further sub-divide the debate into an acronym soup of technicalities and private language games.

For those wanting to follow the process, the main negotiations are currently take place in an Ad Hoc Working Group on Long Term Cooperative Action (AWGLCA), which talks about ´shared vision´ and ´long-term goal´ - in other words, what targets are needed for emissions reductions globally, who will be bound by these, and what structures will be put in place to ensure they are reached.

The complexity of the negotiations cannot be explained by a reliance on scientific evidence either, since not only the solutions offered but even the scenarios discussed at the UN are inadequate to the scale of the climate crisis.

While there is growing scientific evidence that 350 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere is a safe level at which to stabilise the climate, the scenarios under discussion tend to start only at 450 ppm - and these further flatten out the unpredictability of ´slow feedback mechanisms´ in an effort to create graphs that policymakers can digest.

Even then, optimistic graphs plotting a course to tackling climate change only bring us so far. While scenarios for emissions reductions show sweeping downward curves, the pattern of existing emissions all points in the opposite direction. The International Energy Agency´s World Energy Outlook 2008, for example, points to a growing energy demand of 1.6 per cent per year on average between 2006 and 2030 – an increase of 45 per cent. Emissions from agriculture and transport are growing even more rapidly.

These are structural problems relating to how we produce energy and food globally, and which are ´locked in´ by – amongst other factors – a pattern of continued investment in fossil fuel based energy infrastructure, a food system based on large-scale industrialised agriculture, and a free market model that increases the gap between where products are produced and consumed.

Yet instead of considering how to address these major drivers of the climate crisis, the UN climate regime accommodates itself to the continuation of this ´business as usual´, translating the climate crisis into a problem of market failure which it then looks to the market to resolve.

The Kyoto Protocol, agreed in 1998 as the main international instrument for addressing climate change, is a case in point. At its heart lies a system of carbon trading, a multi-billion dollar scheme whose basic premise is that polluters can pay someone else to clean up their mess so that they don’t have to. The premise is that the ‘hidden hand’ of the market will then provide a guide to the cheapest emissions cuts. But this kind of economic efficiency is generally not what is the best for the climate.

Such a market abstracts from the source of emissions – from mines to factories – to a commodity called ´carbon´. In the process, reductions from industrial sources are rendered equivalent to activities like tree planting (´sinks´, in the jargon) – a scientific nonsense, which as a side-effect has seen the international debate framed in predominantly financial terms. The price of this commodity is then set by the market itself, but this is driven by speculation rather than ecological fundamentals. What we are left with is a climate regime that is built around the same failed system that led to the recent financial collapse.

The problems with carbon trading in general are then compounded by the specific ´offset´ mechanism that lies at the heart of the UN´s largest carbon market scheme, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). This was initially billed as a means to drive sustainable investment in countries without binding emissions targets. Yet in practice, it has amounted to a zero-sum game for counting dubious ´emission reduction´ projects in the global South as a reduction in the North.

By various extraordinary conjuring tricks, investments in large dams in China, coal plants and pig-iron factories in India, and palm oil refineries in Indonesia are treated as if they were the same as emissions reductions in Europe, Canada or Japan. The assumption that such expenditure is ´additional´, and therefore counts as a reduction – has been shown time and again to be bogus. One recent survey by International Rivers, a non-governmental organisation, found that 76 per cent of projects were already completed by the time they were approved as eligible for the scheme.

In social terms, the CDM is also a disaster. Billed as a means of transferring cash for development, it has basically just outsourced the task of reducing emissions – with transfers going almost exclusively to large corporations, rather than affected communities. To take just one example, the Allain Duhangan Dam in the Indian Himalayas was approved for CDM registration in May 2007, despite the fact that the the Office of the Compliance Advisor/Ombudsman of the World Bank verified that the project developer had not ensured enough irrigation and drinking water for affected villages.

The project was also temporarily halted and fined for blatant violations of Indian forest conservation law due to illegal felling of trees, dumping of waste and road construction. (For more cases, see www.carbontradewatch.org)

Which brings us, finally, to the most fundamental failure in the international climate regime: its lack of justice. Climate change is not a problem caused by ´humanity´ in general. It has been driven by the overexploitation of resources by one part of humanity for over 250 years, when Northern countries (and, at a later point in history, the former Soviet bloc) industrialised their economies on the basis of cheap energy prices. Climate justice means that these same countries should shoulder the responsibility for fixing the problem.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) itself refers to ´common but differentiated responsibilities´, but unless this is taken seriously then there may be no deal in Copenhagen – or, even worse, a bad deal that exacerbates the climate divide rather than closing it.

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Poznan Statement from the Climate Justice Now! Alliance

We will not be able to stop climate change if we don't change the neo-liberal and corporate-based economy which stops us from achieving sustainable societies, writes Climate Justice Now! alliance in the Poznan statement.

Members of Climate Justice Now! – a worldwide alliance of more than 160 organisations -- have been in Poznan for the past two weeks closely following developments in the UN climate negotiations.

This statement is our assessment of the Conference of Parties (COP) 14, and articulates our principles for achieving climate justice.

The urgency of climate justice

We will not be able to stop climate change if we don't change the neo-liberal and corporate-based economy which stops us from achieving sustainable societies. Corporate globalisation must be stopped.

The historical responsibility for the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions lies with the industrialised countries of the North. Even though the primary responsibility of the North to reduce emissions has been recognised in the Convention, their production and consumption habits continue to threaten the survival of humanity and biodiversity. It is imperative that the North urgently shifts to a low carbon economy. At the same time in order to avoid the damaging carbon intensive model of industrialisation, the South is entitled to resources and technology to make this transition.

We believe that any ´shared vision´ on addressing the climate crisis must start with climate justice and with a radical re-thinking of the dominant development model.

Indigenous Peoples, peasant communities, fisherfolk, and especially women in these communities, have been living harmoniously and sustainably with the Earth for millennia. They are not only the most affected by climate change, but also its false solutions, such as agrofuels, mega-dams, genetic modification, tree plantations and carbon offset schemes. Instead of market led schemes, their sustainable practices should be seen as offering the real solutions to climate change.

UNFCCC in crisis

Governments and international institutions have to recognise that the Kyoto mechanisms have failed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The principles of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – common but differentiated responsibilities, inter-generational equity, and polluter pays -- have been undermined in favour of market mechanisms. The three main pillars of the Kyoto agreement --the clean development mechanism, joint implementation and emissions trading schemes -- have been completely ineffective in reducing emissions, yet they continue to be at the center of the negotiations.

Kyoto is based on carbon-trading mechanisms which allow Northern countries to continue business as usual by paying for “clean development” projects in developing and transition countries. This is a scheme designed deliberately to allow polluters to avoid reducing emissions domestically.

Clean development mechanism projects, which are supposed to support “sustainable development”, include infrastructure projects such as big dams and coal-fired power plants, and monoculture tree plantations. Not only do these projects fail to reduce carbon emissions, they accelerate the privatisation and corporate take-over of the natural world, at the expense of local communities and Indigenous Peoples.

Proposals on the table in Poznan are heading in the same direction.

In the current negotiations, industrialised countries continue to act on the basis of self-interest, using all their negotiating tactics to avoid their obligations to reduce carbon emissions, to finance adaptation and mitigation and transfer technology to the South.

In their pursuit of growth at any cost, many Southern governments at the talks are trading away the rights of their peoples and resources. We remind them that a climate agreement is not a trade agreement.

The main protagonists for climate stability – Indigenous Peoples, women, peasant and family farmers, fisherfolk, forest dependent communities, youth, and marginalised and affected communities in the global South and North, are systematically excluded. Despite repeated demands, Indigenous Peoples are not recognised as an official party to the negotiations. Neither are women’s voices and gender considerations recognised and included in the process.

At the same time, private investors are circling the talks like vultures, swooping in on every opportunity for creating new profits. Business and corporate lobbyists expanded their influence and monopolized conference space at Poznan. At least 1500 industry lobbyists were present either as NGOs or as members of government delegations.

The Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) scheme could create the climate regime’s largest ever loophole, giving Northern polluters yet another opportunity to buy their way out of emissions reductions. With no mention of biodiversity or Indigenous Peoples’ rights, this scheme might give a huge incentive for countries to sell off their forests, expel Indigenous and peasant communities, and transform forests into tree plantations under corporate-control. Plantations are not forests. Privatisation and dispossession through REDD or any other mechanisms must be stopped.

The World Bank is attempting to carve a niche in the international climate change regime. This is unacceptable as the Bank continues to fund polluting industries and drive deforestation by promoting industrial logging and agrofuels.

The Bank’s recently launched Climate Investment Funds goes against government initiatives at the UN and promotes dirty industries such as coal, while forcing developing countries into the fundamentally unequal aid framework of donor and recipient. The World Bank Forest Carbon Partnership Facility aiming to finance REDD through a forest carbon mechanism serves the interest of private companies and opens the path for commodification of forests.

These developments are to be expected. Market ideology has totally infiltrated the climate talks, and the UNFCCC negotiations are now like trade fairs hawking investment opportunities.