Rarely have ‘talks about talks’ been so crucial.
Next week in the tourist resort of Bali, Indonesia, the world’s nations – rich and poor - convene for two weeks of tortuous make-or-break climate change negotiations. The aim is to put the breaks on global temperature rise in the future and head off cataclysmic predictions from scientists of collapsing ice sheets, more intense disasters and flooding coastlines around the world.
Added urgency is created by the need to agree a timetable for negotiations for emissions cuts after 2012, when the current Kyoto Protocol emissions cut commitments by industrialised countries comes to an end. Ultimately Tearfund and other UK agencies are urging the global community to adopt far deeper cuts in emissions for industrialised countries than the 5% agreed under Kyoto (over 1990 levels). Success in the long-term must see at least:
• 30% emissions cuts for developed countries by 2020
• 50% globally by 2050
• 80% for developed countries by 2050
That is the hoped-for future. But Bali will not come close to agreeing exact figures. Simply charting a ‘roadmap’ for future negotiations which would then set specific targets is the job facing the delegates from nearly 200 countries. If they do not, then there may be insufficient time for countries to agree a post-2012 framework. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon last month laid down a firm challenge to world governments after seeing first hand the impact global warming is having in Antarctica: “I believe we are on the verge of a catastrophe if we do not act,” he stated.
Optimists hope that a new government in Australia ( Kevin Rudd of the victorious Labour Party has pledged to ratify Kyoto) and the prospect of a new government in the United States over the horizon will see two of the countries who have resolutely resisted global commitments moving closer to the global consensus. For as long as the US, which is responsible for 25% of world emissions, holds back from making commitments, other countries with rising emissions such as China and India, will understandably not feel bound to accelerate their own efforts to cut emissions.
In addition to a post-2012 mandate for negotiations, critical issues to be debated in Bali include much more funding to developing countries for adapting to the ravages of climate change, better access to ‘clean technologies’ so their development does not following the high-carbon path that developed countries previously trod. The need to curb deforestation around the world is another critical means of slowing emissions.
It is hoped the impact of climate change upon poor people will be central to the Bali debates. Tearfund believes that lives will be needlessly jeopardised and billions of dollars wasted if governments in Bali fail to urgently commit more money to help poorer countries adapt to global warming, and make climate change central to development projects around the world,
Comments Andy Atkins, Advocacy Director: “The good news is that governments accept that poor countries suffer the most from global warming and need help, and they have woken up to the fact that climate change must become integral to development plans worldwide. The bad news is that unless they agree rapidly how to do it and who should pay, we will see needless suffering on a growing scale. That is one of the great challenges facing this conference.”
But it is not only global negotiators who must tackle this problem. Ordinary citizens have a role to play, and, increasingly, churches are calling on their members to act. Tearfund President Dr Elaine Storkey, said recently: “Indifference to climate change is not only to reject God’s call to stewardship, but to show indifference to neighbour love, for millions of the world’s poor will suffer today through environmental changes. Rising sea-levels, erratic weather conditions, coastal erosions and lack of water are all partly the effects of human irresponsibility.”