An outcome of sorts, but the road from Cancun to Durban is full of holes

Julian Oram, Head of Policy and Campaigns

The dust is starting to settle and my jetlag subsiding after a frantic last week in Cancun. As I readjust to winter, I’ve been taking a cool analysis of those final couple of days of UN climate talks, and the eventual settlement reached in the early hours of Saturday morning.

On the final Friday, a palpable sense of gloom filled the conference. I went to a meeting between some NGOs and a contingent of MEPs accompanying the EU delegation, and was posed a question by an MEP which struck at the heart of what was at stake. “For the poorest and most vulnerable countries,” he asked, “is it more important that the process is kept alive, or that a deal is struck that tackles climate change and its impacts?”

The answer, of course, was both: developing countries depend on a multilateral process to keep their voice heard in the negotiations on climate change; but at the same time a lowest common denominator approach pushed by the US, Canada, Japan and other rich countries would do nothing to help keep climate change in check or help poor countries deal with its effects.

With neither outcome seemingly likely, it was with some despondency that we entered the final sessions of the negotiations. Then, at mid-afternoon on the Friday, the Mexican chair of the Conference, Patricia Espinosa, released two new draft texts on the Kyoto Protocol (KP) and the so-called Long-term Cooperation Action plan (LCA).

When the next informal plenary began around 6pm, government delegations instantly broke into a sustained round of applause. And for good reason. As an act of diplomatic craftsmanship, the texts were impressive, managing to at once placate the US, China, Japan and the least developed countries. All, it seemed, were satisfied with what was on offer.

Well, almost all. Bolivia was, understandably, not the least bit happy. The substance of the Cancun texts may have saved political face and kept the wheels from coming off the UNFCCC bus, but they did little to advance a science and equity based global response to climate change.

The two clearest examples of this were on emissions targets and climate finance. On emissions, the LCA document simply “takes note” of pledges by countries to reduce emissions; how much they reduce or by when is not clear. Nor is there a sense of how the nine gigatonne emissions gap between current pledges and a world kept within a 2°C temperature will be bridged.

On finance, the agreement to establish a new green climate fund to help poor countries respond to climate change was, on the surface, a positive one. But the LCA text leaves it highly unclear where the money will come from, with no explicit obligation for developed countries to contribute public funds. This leaves open the potential for carbon market-based instruments, private sector projects or loans from multilateral development banks to be used as the primary, or even sole, sources of financing under the fund. 

Meanwhile, the total amount to be ‘mobilized’ by developed countries, $100 billion a year by 2020, falls far short of what’s needed. To top matters off, the World Bank is to maintain a role as ‘Trustee’ of the fund, though the exact nature of this relationship remains as yet unclear.

What the Cancun settlement achieved was to delay decisions on all the major issues until the Durban meeting in December 2011. But with little signs of change to the domestic political mood in countries like the US, Canada, Japan or Russia, it seems as though all that’s really been achieved is to ‘offset’ political failure from one conference to the next.