Spotlight Durban: Durban Resource List

Following the conclusion of the UN Climate Change Conference of COP 17 & CMP 7 in Durban, South Africa, and as part of our Spotlight Durban series, Triple Crisis recommends the following analyses on the package of decisions adopted at Durban and what they mean for the Kyoto Protocol and the 2020 successor agreement.

Triple Crisis bloggers

Martin Khor, New talks launched at Durban , The Fight at the Heart of the Durban Climate Talks, and Gloomy Outlook in Durban
Sunita Narain, Choice is between a rock and a hard place and Durban’s final hours
Patrick Bond, A dirty deal coming down in Durban and Occupy Durban
Frank Ackerman, Climate stalemate in Durban: What can be done?
Elizabeth Stanton, Climate change gets personal and Taking Development and Emission Reduction Seriously
Edward Barbier, A REDD and green paradox

Other Commentaries
Robert Stavins, Assessing the Climate Talks — Did Durban Succeed?
Fiona Harvey and John Vidal, Durban Deal will not avert catastrophic climate change
John Broder, Climate Talks in Durban Yield Limited Agreement
Oxfam,  Climate deal fails poor people
Durban Climate Deal: The verdict , a compilation of reactions from world leaders at The Guardian
Desmond Tutu and Mary Robinson, Climate Justice
Jagdish Bhagwati, Deadlock in Durban

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Spotlight Durban: Durban’s final hours

Sunita Narain

Durban, December 9: The halls outside are full of people who are now waiting for some action. But strangely enough, there is no sense of anticipation or excitement. Strange in a world, which is increasingly seeing the pain of climate change impacts, and which knows that time is running out.

So what was the agenda for this conference, and what is the expected outcome?

To the climate uninitiated, Durban has been portrayed as a fight between the ‘good’ – namely, the European Union (EU) – and the ‘bad’ – in this case, India in specific and China in general. The EU wants to move the world, and urgently; it has set a target for the completion of a new agreement by 2015 at the latest. It expects that this agreement will be legally binding and will include all countries to take commitments to reduce emissions in the future. This is necessary because the existing agreement, Kyoto Protocol, only sets emission reduction targets for the industrialised countries. Now with the world changing – China’s annual emissions have overtaken the US and India’s are growing as well – the new agreement must have all these countries on board. This is all good and necessary. The world indeed needs urgent action and the emerging world’s emissions have increased: therefore, new kinds of agreements are necessary.

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Spotlight Durban: New talks launched at Durban

Martin Khor

United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban ended on Sunday morning with the launch of negotiations for a new global climate deal to be completed in 2015.

The new deal aims to ensure “the highest possible mitigation efforts by all Parties”, meaning that the countries should undertake deep Greenhouse Gas emissions cuts, or lower the growth rates of their emissions.

It will take the form of either “a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force”.

In a night of high drama, the European Union tried to pressurize India and China to agree to commit to a legally binding treaty such as a protocol, and to agree to cancel the term “legal outcome” from the list of three possible results, as they said this was too weak an option.

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Spotlight Durban: The Fight at the Heart of the Durban Climate Talks

Martin Khor

Another in a Triple Crisis and Real Climate Economics Blog series on the Durban Climate Change Conference.

The UN Climate Conference is reaching its climax.  Perhaps the most important decision being made is on the future of the global climate regime, and whether it will be as fair as the present one, or less so.  And also whether what is decided is enough to tackle the worsening climate situation on the ground.

The hottest topic is the fate of the Kyoto Protocol.  Japan, Canada and Russia have announced they do not want to undertake a second period of commitment, when the first period expires in 2012.

The developing countries have been fighting for the protocol’s survival and vowed that Durban shall not be the protocol’s burial ground.  All developed countries except the United States had committed to reduce their emissions by a certain percentage under this protocol.

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Spotlight Durban: Climate stalemate in Durban: What can be done?

Frank Ackerman
Another in a Triple Crisis and Real Climate Economics Blog series on the Durban Climate Change Conference.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: the world is again conferring about what to do about climate change, and again deciding to do very little. If it wasn’t so serious, it would be funny. The satirical publication The Onion greeted the COP17 conference in Durban, South Africa by announcing the release of a new report showing that global warming may be irreversible if no action is taken to prevent it before 2006; in an example of fair and balanced reporting, they also interviewed a critic who put the point of no return as late as 2010.

The real debate in Durban seems less realistic than The Onion’s satire. Should the Kyoto Protocol, currently scheduled to expire next year, be extended or replaced by a better agreement to limit emissions? Will the promised $100 billion funding for climate adaptation – let alone the larger sums that will actually be needed – somehow materialize? Or should we just agree to keep talking?

While others are not blameless, the United States is the leader of the do-nothings, the country whose inaction ensures a global climate stalemate. As long as the world’s largest economy, with the largest cumulative emissions and the greatest resources to tackle the climate crisis, refuses to act, others are not likely to move forward on their own. Yet there is not a snowball’s chance in Texas that any significant climate policy will survive the current U.S. Congress.

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Spotlight Durban: Climate Action on Multiple Scales

Paul Baer, guest blogger
Another in a Triple Crisis and Real Climate Economics Blog series on the Durban Climate Change Conference.

From November 28th through December 9th, the world’s nations are meeting again to discuss solutions to the urgent threat of rising  greenhouse gas emissions, this time in Durban, South Africa. This meeting, the Seventeenth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, has been much less widely anticipated than the meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark, two years ago. At that time, expectations were high, President Obama had just taken office, and for the first time ever literally dozens of heads of state were scheduled to attend a climate convention. Yet the result – a non-binding agreement called the “Copenhagen Accord” – was widely disappointing, and since then, the prospects for strengthening that agreement have only grown more remote. Indeed, even the continuation of the Kyoto Protocol (which the US did not ratify) is in serious doubt at this point.

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Spotlight Durban: A dirty deal coming down in Durban

Patrick Bond
Another in a Triple Crisis and Real Climate Economics Blog series on the Durban Climate Change Conference.

What, now, are the prospects for a climate deal by Friday?

The biggest problem is obvious: COP17 saboteurs from the US State Department joined by Canada, Russia and Japan, want to bury the legally-binding Kyoto Protocol treaty. Instead of relaxing intellectual property rules on climate technology and providing a fair flow of finance, Washington offers only a non-binding ‘pledge and review’ system.

This is unenforceable and at current pledge rates – with Washington lagging everyone – is certain to raise world temperatures to four degrees centigrade, and in Africa much higher. Estimates of the resulting deaths of Africans this century are now in excess of 150 million. As former Bolivian Ambassadar to the UN, Pablo Solon said at last week’s Wolpe Memorial Lecture, “The COP17 will be remembered as a place of premeditated genocide and ecocide.”
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Spotlight Durban: An Island Nation’s Call For Gifts to the World

His Excellency Anote Tong, President of Kiribati
Another in a Triple Crisis and Real Climate Economics Blog series on the Durban Climate Change Conference.

Earlier this fall, I crossed the Pacific Ocean from the island nation of Kiribati, which I am privileged to serve as President, to visit the United States.

In the days just before the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, I saw and heard many references to the “resilience” of the American people. President Obama spoke of it, the covers of magazines displayed it. There is no doubt that Americans have found within them the capacity to absorb tremendous shocks, to adapt and heal from unimaginable disaster.

I listened as my American hosts spoke about your economic challenges. I understand that the hardship in your country is great. I heard of many people who are jobless, “underwater” on their home loans, and struggling to make ends meet. I know the deep insecurity that many of you feel.

These same ten years have brought another sort of disaster to my country, a constellation of low-lying, reef-fringed islands scattered across 1.3 million square miles of the South Pacific. On average, our islands are just two meters above sea level. Scientists anticipate sea level rise of one meter or more as a result of climate change within this century. You begin to see the catastrophe that Kiribati faces.

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Spotlight Durban: A REDD and green paradox

Edward B. Barbier
Another in a Triple Crisis and Real Climate Economics Blog series on the Durban Climate Change Conference.

In a previous post (Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay!) I posed the question: What do the worldwide debt crisis and global warming have in common?

They both represent economies drawing down assets faster than they can replenish them.

In the case of the debt crisis, economies are spending more wealth than they are accumulating.  In the case of global warming, we are using up nature’s capital and its vital services at an alarming rate.  Rather than adding to wealth – both financial and natural – economies are squandering it.  This problem has occurred throughout history, although the tendency to waste economic and natural wealth has accelerated in recent times.

Which leads me to the climate change talks in Durban, South Africa, and especially the efforts to establish a financial mechanism to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) in developing countries.

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Spotlight Durban: National Interests, Ethics, and Climate Change – Don’t Listen to (Most) Economists

Julie Nelson, Guest Blogger
Another in a Triple Crisis and Real Climate Economics Blog series on the Durban Climate Change Conference.

What are the ethical responsibilities of sovereign nations? How can we expect nations to behave, in regards to climate change? We often hear that  nations will inevitably try to shape policy in ways that serve their own interests, where “interests” are largely defined in terms of short-run economic growth. Yet, if every nation sets this as a goal, we are—to use a particularly apt colloquialism—cooked.

I’m afraid that economists are particularly to blame for this perverse framing of the issue. In the economics mainstream, people are thought of as autonomous individuals who are driven by a desire to maximize their own levels of personal satisfaction.  Sociality,  care, ethical responsibilities, and environmental impacts are not part of the story. The insistent teaching of this approach over the last century or so has led many people to believe that selfish and even opportunistic behavior is simply “natural” or “standard” in commercial life—and therefore both excusable and unavoidable. A number of scholars of economics, law, and politics have extended this approach to thinking about governments, considering states as simply  “economic man” writ large.

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