Copenhagen - Pre-Cooked Charges Kohona After Confab Ends With Little Achieved

In this part of the world despondency is in the air, a despondency tinged with anger at the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit to come up with hard, tangible evidence of the will of world leaders to deal with an issue that is arguably the most crucial of our time.

Despondency because governments and civil society had hoped that though there was little substantive progress at the UN sponsored two-week world climate change conference in Bangkok last October, that the big beasts on the world stage would re-think their positions and consider the global good, leading to a constructive and forward looking agreement.

It need not have been immediately legally binding as long as world leaders worked to that end and such an agreement could have been stitched up this year, well before the Kyoto Protocol on climate change fades into the sunset.

Nobody in their right mind would have expected Copenhagen to produce a comprehensive agreement, a successor to the Kyoto Protocol that ends in two years. What they expected was an untangling of the mess that was Bangkok and a few definitive steps towards dealing with an issue that would have enormous consequences for this planet and future generations unless it is tackled here and now.

Never mind the naysayers who will continue to deny that climate change is largely man-made even if the Arctic ice-cap fell on their collective head.

Copenhagen failed to produce even tentative agreement. All the hot air that escaped from the tightly closed conference hall last month, all the good intentions articulated by leaders of countries which are contributing to the problem of climate change today and have been doing so for decades, in no way matched the niggardly outcome that most countries rightly refused to endorse.

By many accounts I have read of the Copenhagen gathering, it had been hijacked by a handful of countries, what one might call the big beasts. This conference should have been an important step in the UN-led multilateral negotiating process that began some years ago.

But the majority of the 193 states represented at the conference never had a look in at the final crucial stages of the meeting as some major nations took over its running, thanks to the staged-managed efforts of the host, Denmark.

In the end the big beasts tried to impose that solution- rather a wishy-washy statement of intent with no binding commitments- which the rest of the world buried in several inches snow outside hoping that it will hibernate there until wisdom dawns (hopefully before long) on the developed and the developing that time has almost run out for man, beast and flora.

Hardly had the conference ended when some political leaders were hailing it as a step in the right direction, even if it was a tiny step for mankind. Others joined by their media henchmen had begun pointing the finger of blame at other national leaders hoping to draw the ire and fire of most developing countries away from their own miserable performances.

If one were to rely on sections of the British and American media, it was China that scuttled the Copenhagen conference by taking a hardline position on international inspection and verification of Beijing’s commitments on carbon emission reductions on grounds of national sovereignty.

Others argue that the Obama administration with the able assistance of the prime minister of Denmark, the host nation, tried to impose a ‘solution’ after isolating most of the world from the multilateral decision-making process.

Meanwhile representatives of several internationally-known civil society organizations that were metaphorically and literarily left out in the cold, dubbed Copenhagen a failure.

Here in Bangkok, the UN’s Asian regional centre that had hosted the penultimate conference ahead of Copenhagen, much of what is known about Copenhagen and its outcome has been gleaned from the media. How one assesses the outcome depends on what media one has read or watched.

I was glad therefore to talk to Dr Palitha Kohona, currently Sri Lanka’s Permanent Representative to the UN in New York who was on our delegation to the Copenhagen confab which, if you believe its critics, was more con than confab.

Palitha Kohona spent a few hours in Bangkok on his way from Canberra where he had caught up with some of his former colleagues in the Australian diplomatic service.

So, was Copenhagen a “fiasco” and its outcome “dismal” as London’s Financial Times called it?

Kohona says he will not go so far as to call it a failure. The challenge before the international community was enormous. As such there was always a risk that a comprehensive result would be difficult to achieve.

World attention was focussed on an issue that was of great concern to humanity. Still progress was bound to be slow because of its complexity.

“There would be no headline shattering announcements. It would be a gradual move towards an accommodation,” argued Kohona.

But the rate of progress would not satisfy everyone especially the small island states who are extremely vulnerable to climate change. Yet it is not only those states that were left unsatiated. There were also states that could be described as developed and developing that found the progress unacceptable.

At Copenhagen there was an enthusiastic determination among some participants to do a “deal”. But many developing countries felt that this was the wrong approach. What was needed was not a “deal” with all its negative connotations.

“Climate change is a problem for all of humanity, not just an opportunity to engage in a haggling match to make a deal,” argued Kohona.

He said that it was very clear from the first day that a “pre-cooked” solution was going to be rammed through by a few countries. However the developing countries resisted this attempt to force- feed a solution, particularly the G-77 led by Sudan.

China too vehemently opposed this effort at bulldozing by a few nations without engaging and consulting the vast majority. In fact China found it unacceptable that it be asked to commit itself to cut emission levels when it had to continue with its development efforts to lift some 300 million people out of poverty.

As I see it, this demand is coming mainly from countries that have freely polluted the atmosphere for decades and decades during their development going back perhaps to the industrial revolution and now want others to halt or curtail the development efforts of the poorer countries.

Sri Lanka naturally stood alongside the G-77 on the issue of climate change-that developing countries pursuing living standards the west has long enjoyed should not be forced into signing legally binding emission caps, contending that they should have the same freedom the west has enjoyed for well over two centuries since the start of the industrial revolution.

“It is outrageous to expect developing countries including China to curtail or suspend development while those who have reached high levels of development are not willing to make a sacrifice,” argued Kohona.

The carbon emission targets offered by both the US and EU were considered by the developing world to be thoroughly inadequate, he said.

Sri Lanka will continue its own efforts to mitigate climate change and adapt where it is possible to do so but would not be diverted from its development path, says Kohona.

But adaptation for the vast majority of the developing nations including Sri Lanka will not be possible unless the rich nations provide the financing and the technological support to make such climate-friendly changes.

What emerged from Copenhagen, as several media reports indicated, were some noises by the rich nations about funding but nothing firm. Where the money was coming from, whether this would be part of normal development assistance or not, was hardly the kind of ‘promise’, however well intended, that developing nations were ready to accept.

As Kohona puts it the breakdown in Copenhagen occurred because of a lack of enthusiasm for committing enough funding. The amounts offered by the US and EU to assist developing countries in emission cuts and adaptation were also thoroughly inadequate.

Personally I would go further than Kohona does to explain the collapse of the Copenhagen Conference.

Kohona is correct when he says the solution offered was pre-cooked. The answer to the question why Copenhagen did not produce the desired result lies in who was responsible for cooking this tasteless and unpalatable dish.

The answer is that 26 countries and their leaders handpicked by the Danish prime minister hijacked the conference on the last two days and tried to force feed a solution without the concurrence-nay the knowledge- of the rest of the world.

This process initiated and encouraged by Denmark which not only invited this exclusive club but even produced a pre-prepared text for approval, undermined completely and violated the multilateral treaty-based process that was intended to be adopted in working towards a solution.

Curiously the US which rejected the Kyoto outcome and was not a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol took the lead in trying to ram through an agreement in Copenhagen.

These backdoor attempts by the Copenhagen Cabal to do a deal without considering the views and concerns of the rest of the participating nations was thrown out of the front door by angry developing country representatives who resented the fact that the west and some others had excluded them.

In fact the accord was harshly criticized at the final plenary and not adopted. The conference only agreed to “take note” of it. No wonder, because this accord does not contain any commitments by the developed countries to reduce their emissions in the medium term.

The failure of Copenhagen, if failure it indeed was, was not because China stood firm though that is what some western leaders would want us to believe.

It was because a small exclusive club tried to leave the rest of the world out in the cold. And the majority was not going to stand for it.

- Asian Tribune -