Cancun Watch: New texts, Huhne stays and Bangladesh makes a point

Julian Oram, used to be Head of policy and campaigns

Yesterday morning we were greeted with new negotiating texts from the twin tracks of the talks here in Cancun. These new texts represent the closest approximation of the ‘progress’ reached thus far through the past ten days of discussions.

These discussions have happened primarily in the multitude of working groups in  the twin negotiating tracks of the Kyoto Protocol and the framework for Long-term Cooperative Action. Wednesday’s documents represented an effort to consolidate these tortured talks into something vaguely coherent for Ministers to sink their teeth into.

I qualify the word ‘progress’, because in most areas the texts are neither especially advanced nor particularly encouraging for the world’s poorest countries.

Take the area of finance. The text dealing with a new global climate fund for poor countries to access finance for climate adaptation and low-carbon development is still heavily bracketed (i.e. under debate) and littered with opposing options.

Under one option, the aggregate sum is still pegged at a $100 billion/ year by 2020 for adaptation and mitigation; a sum that falls far short of amounts needed by most reliable estimates. Another option (put forward by Bolivia) is for the Fund to be financed through contributions amounting to 1.5 per cent of developed countries’ GDP. In terms of who will run the fund, one option favours the World Bank, another option one of ‘open and competitive bidding’.

Similarly large disagreements remain on technology transfer, capacity building, the role of market-based instruments (including carbon markets) to contribute to efforts to reduce emissions, forestry and a host of other issues.

With the negotiating teams still at an impasse on these key issues, its now up to the Ministers to decide what they will and won’t compromise on. The UK climate and energy minister, Chris Huhne, made a speech yesterday at a plenary session in which he called for ‘a legally binding global deal to keep global temperature increase at 2 degrees or less’.

Certainly we’d love to see that too – although 1.5 or less is really where we should be aiming if we want to prevent massive global suffering. But the point is that Britain has thus not done enough to facilitate such a deal, or make sure it remains fair to the world’s poorest countries.

At least Huhne was here to give the speech. There was a lot uncertainty today about whether he was going to be called back to London to ensure the government did not lose the vote in Parliament on tuition fees. In the end it looks like he’s staying for the duration, and will have to share the burden of responsibility if the outcome of the summit ends up as, in his words, a ‘car-crash’, with no progress at all.

And in case people here lost sight of what’s at stake, the government of Bangladesh yesterday hosted a side event on national responses to and international responsibilities for climate change in their country. In a packed room, the presentations by the Minister for the environment and other members of the delegation were both shocking and inspiring.

Shocking because they revealed that Bangladesh is already being profoundly effected by climate change, and because no part of the country is being left untouched; whether from sea level rise, river basin flooding, or drought. Inspiring because the country already has a strong national action plan and measures in place to help it cope.

What the country lacks is sufficient money to scale up these programmes, and the international responsibility dimension it sees that the wealthy countries which primarily caused the problem should stump up the cash to help Bangladesh meet these costs.

A UK official from DfID joining the panel boasted of Britain’s role in helping Bangladesh meet this challenge through various funding streams. What he didn’t mention was that much of this money is not new or additional to existing aid commitments, and that a large share is going as loans via the World Bank that the people of Bangladesh will have to repay.

So at the end I asked the panel: do they think loans from rich countries for climate adaptation in Bangladesh are appropriate?

The Minister replied immediately and forcefully: loans are not acceptable for adaptation. The audience applauded, the DfID official grimaced, and I smiled. In the morass of PR layered on by the rich countries here in Cancun, at least someone had stood up and publicly let it be known that Britain’s policy of forcing poor countries to pay for the damage we created is just plain wrong.