Coping With Copenhagen

SCIAF's Rowan Popplewell blogs from Copenhagen to keep you up to speed with the UN climate summit.

Saturday 19th December

Verdict: UN Failure Must Be Overcome

The people of poor and vulnerable nations will raise their faces to the heavens in desperation following the virtually meaningless agreement that came out of Copenhagen yesterday, whilst the leaders of developed nations should hang their heads in shame.

The ‘Copenhagen Accord’ is akin to a death warrant for poor and vulnerable communities across the world already living at the sharp end of climate change. For every year of inaction, many thousands of lives will be lost and further delay will result in even greater and more widespread misery.

The agreement, hammered out by the US and a select group of emerging economies, recognises the importance of keeping global temperatures below 2oC, but contains no concrete targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Instead countries are invited to set their own targets based on what they consider to be economically and politically viable rather than what science and justice requires.

This will spell disaster for many poor developing countries. The UN estimates that current emissions reduction pledges will lead a rise in temperatures of at least 3oC. Temperature increases of this level will cause widespread hunger, disease and mortality as a result of rising sea levels, coastal flooding, conflict over increasingly scarce resources, and frequent and severe droughts and floods which devastate crops.

The mediocre short-term funding commitments and the vague aspirational promise of future funding of $100 billion by 2020 will not be enough to support poor communities to respond to impacts of this magnitude. Many developing countries rejected these promises of money outright, announcing that their very existence cannot be bought, as the island state of Tuvalu has said, for 30 pieces of silver.

Over the course of these two weeks, developing countries have shown a willingness to be involved in an inclusive process to tackle the problem. Many poor nations have invested their faith in the UN process and have worked day and night to get a strong, just and legally binding deal. The last-minute adoption of the US-led agreement has sidelined these efforts and failed to deliver the binding action plan that is needed to guarantee the survival of the people of developing countries and even the very existence of many small island states, leaving many poor countries feeling betrayed.

International efforts to address the problem of climate change have been ongoing for many years, and the Bali Road Map - agreed two years ago - was supposed to set out the path to a binding global deal in Copenhagen. When so much has gone before, it is difficult to accept the Copenhagen Accord as a ‘first step’. It will be hard for developing countries to invest their trust in future agreements when their interests and the lives of their people have been so blatantly disregarded this week. Copenhagen will go down in history as a sad and costly missed opportunity. Negotiations in 2010 can and must produce a fair ambitious and legally binding agreement, but the breakdown in trust between rich and poor nations will be hard to repair.

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SCIAF believes the world must accept nothing less than a fair, ambitious and legally binding agreement which sees other developed countries follow Scotland’s lead and commit to greenhouse gas emissions cuts of more than 40% by 2020 – based on 1990 levels. We also need to see wealthy nations provide $195 billion in funding by 2020 – on top of existing aid commitments - to help developing countries harness green technologies and protect themselves from the worst impacts of climate change.

Despite this weak agreement and the chaos we have seen in Copenhagen over the last two weeks, we now have to look towards 2010 and keep on fighting for a safe future for all. SCIAF is dedicated to campaigning to make sure the voices of the poorest are heard at the highest levels.

The drive to get a fair and binding climate change deal will continue and we need your continuing support, so watch this space!

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