The 2012 United Nations Climate Change Conference was the
18th yearly session of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the
1992
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
and the 8th session of the Meeting of the Parties (CMP) to the 1997
Kyoto Protocol (the protocol having been developed under the
UNFCCC's charter). The conference took place from Monday 26 November
to Saturday 8 December 2012, at the
Qatar National Convention Centre in
Doha.[1]
The conference reached an agreement to extend the life of the Kyoto
Protocol, which had been due to expire at the end of 2012, until 2020,
and to reify the 2011
Durban Platform, meaning that a successor to the Protocol is set to
be developed by 2015 and implemented by 2020. Wording adopted by the
conference incorporated for the first time the concept of "loss and
damage", an agreement in principle that richer nations could be
financially responsible to other nations for their failure to reduce
carbon emissions.[2]
Background
The United Nations Climate Change Conferences are annual government
meetings held in different locations around the world under the
sponsorship of the United Nations that serve as a forum for countries to
discuss climate change matters. The conferences seek to address the
threat of
global warming caused by
greenhouse gas emissions like
carbon dioxide. Between 2000-2011
carbon dioxide growth in the atmosphere was 20% of the total
concentration growth since prehistoric level (391,57 ppm in 2011 and
369,52 ppm in 2000)
[3] The concentration of
carbon dioxide in
Earth's atmosphere has reached 391 ppm (parts per million) as of
October 2012[4][5]
versus the pre-industrial concentration was 280 ppm[6]
which the
consensus of world
climate scientists agree is unsustainable.
The conferences are attended by dignitaries and sometimes heads of
state from most countries and generally draw significant activity by
various environmental advocacy groups. Consequently, the conferences are
generally well covered by the world media agencies. The 2012 conference
is held at the Qatar National Convention Centre in Doha, and with a
projected attendance of 17,000 participants it is expected to be the
largest conference to have ever been held in Qatar.[7]
The conference is casually called the COP18 /CMP 8 conference but these
are technically different but closely related and sometimes integrated
conferences. In 2012, the UNFCCC conference serves as an umbrella for
seven concurrent and interrelated meeting groups collectively called the
Doha 2012 UNFCCC conference. The main conference is also preceded by
several topical pre-sessions.
Pre-sessions to the 2012 UNFCCC conference
- 70th meeting of the Clean Development Mechanism Executive Board
(19 to 23 November)
- Least developed countries Preparatory Meetings (20 to 21
November)
- Small island developing States Preparatory Meetings (22 to 23
November)
- African Group Preparatory Meetings (22 to 23 November)
- Informal pre-sessional meeting of Parties to exchange further
views on the possible recommendations on loss and damage associated
with the adverse effects of climate change(24 November)
- G-7 & China Preparatory Meetings (24 to 25 November)
Concurrent conferences under the umbrella of the 2012 UNFCCC conference
The Doha 2012 United Nations Climate Change Conference is an
agglomeration of multiple related conferences being conducted roughly in
parallel and in a semi-integrated fashion over the two weeks that the
conference is in session:
- Eighteenth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 18)
- Eighth session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the
meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP 8)
- Thirty-seventh session of the Subsidiary Body for Implementation
(SBI 37)
- Thirty-seventh session of the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and
TechnologicalAdvice (SBSTA 37)
- Seventeenth session of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Further
Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol (second
part) (AWG-KP 17.2)
- Fifteenth session of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term
Cooperative Action under the Convention (second part) (AWG-LCA 15.2)
- First session of the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform
for Enhanced Action (second part) (ADP 1.2)
Conference focus
The conference focused on five aspects of climate change:
- Adaptation - social and other changes that must be
undertaken to successfully
adapt to climate change. Adaptation might encompass, but is not
limited to, changes in agriculture and urban planning.
- Finance - how countries will finance adaptation to and
mitigation of climate change, whether from public or private
sources.
- Mitigation - steps and actions that the countries of the
world can take to mitigate the effects of climate change.
- Technology - the technologies that are needed to adapt or
mitigate climate change and ways in which developed countries can
support developing countries in adopting them.
- Loss and damage - first articulated at the 2012
conference and in part based on the agreement that was signed at the
2010 United Nations Climate Change Conference in
Cancun. It introduces the principle that countries vulnerable to
the effects of climate change may be financially compensated in
future by countries that fail to curb their carbon emissions.
Conference
structure
The conference is generally a two week conference consisting of the
following activities:
- Speeches from UN bureaucrats
- Speeches from dignitaries and sometimes heads of state
- Closed working sessions by various working groups
- Open breakouts and working sessions by various working groups
- Announcements by countries on a particular position
- Announcements of agreements by UN bureaucrats
The conference will sometimes see late night (or all night) working
sessions when diplomats cannot agree to the terms and conditions of
agreements and sometimes staged walk-outs by some parties is not
uncommon. The last several conferences of this type have suffered from
impasses in the first week and a half of talks, followed by a series of
rounds of very late night discussions, sometimes followed by an
extension of the conference which finally yields a modest progress
agreement.
External to the conference, the conference generally attracts well
organized protests, rallies and demonstrations by various environmental
groups urging the participants to reach agreement on the topic of
climate change policy. In recent conferences, some activist groups have
given daily informal awards to countries that they see as advancing or
detracting from their particular ideological position.
Conference
outcomes
The Conference produced a package of documents collectively titled
The Doha Climate Gateway over objections from Russia and other
countries at the session.[8]
The documents collectively contained:
- An eight year extension of the Kyoto Protocol until 2020 limited
in scope to only 15% of the global carbon dioxide emissions due to
the lack of participation of Canada, Japan, Russia, Belarus,
Ukraine, New Zealand and the United States and due to the fact that
developing countries like China (the world's largest emitter), India
and Brazil are not subject to any emissions reductions under the
Kyoto Protocol.[9]
- Language on loss and damage, formalized for the first time in
the conference documents.
- The conference made little progress towards the funding of the
Green Climate Fund.[10]
Russia, Belarus and Ukraine objected at the end of the session, as
they have a right to under the session's rules. In closing the
conference, the President said that he would note these objections in
his final report.[10]
Reaction to the conference outcomes
Reaction to the conference outcomes was characterized as "modest, at
best" by NPR.[11]
Kieren Keke, Foreign Minister of
Nauru and
the representative of the
Alliance of Small Island States at the conference[12],
was quoted by the BBC as saying,
"We see the package before us as deeply deficient in mitigation
(carbon cuts) and finance. It's likely to lock us on the trajectory
to a 3, 4, 5°C rise in global temperatures, even though we agreed to
keep the global average temperature rise of 1.5°C to ensure survival
of all islands,"[10]
Others like Martin Khor of the South Center, an association of
developing nations saw a more positive outcome, specifically regarding
the Loss and Damage Mechanism:
"It is a breakthrough...The term Loss and Damage is in the text —
this is a huge step in principle. Next comes the fight for cash."[10]
Jennifer Morgan of the
World Resources Institute told
NPR about the
Loss and Damage Mechanism that:
"This basically would set up a liability structure about who is
liable for climate change...And while I think that's a very
important question for people to answer, I don't think the world is
ready for that yet."[13]
Regarding the path to the $100 billion in
Green Climate Fund financing, Jennifer Morgan told
NPR the
following:
"there's no bridge, no pathway between now and the $100 billion
number...so one of the real crunch issues here, which I think will
determine whether we will get out of the building with an agreement
or not, is whether developed countries are ready to at least say
that they're going to match what they've been providing thus far."[14]
Criticisms of the conference and UNFCCC Process
The overall umbrella and processes of the UNFCCC and the adopted
Kyoto Protocol have been criticized by some as not having achieved its
stated goals of reducing the emission of
carbon dioxide (the primary culprit blamed for rising global
temperatures of the 21st century).[15]
At a speech given at his alma mater, Todd Stern — the US Climate Change
envoy — has expressed the challenges with the UNFCCC process as follows,
“Climate change is not a conventional environmental issue...It
implicates virtually every aspect of a state’s economy, so it makes
countries nervous about growth and development. This is an economic
issue every bit as it is an environmental one.” He went on to explain
that, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is a
multilateral body concerned with climate change and can be an
inefficient system for enacting international policy. Because the
framework system includes over 190 countries and because negotiations
are governed by consensus, small groups of countries can often block
progress.[16]
The failure to achieve meaningful progress and reach effective-CO2
reducing-policy treaties among the parties over the past eighteen years
have driven some countries like the
United States to never ratify the UNFCCC's largest body of work —
the Kyoto Protocol, in large part because the treaty didn't cover
developing countries who now include the largest CO2 emitters. It has
also led
Canada to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol out of a desire to not
force its citizens to pay penalties that would result in wealth
transfers out of Canada.
Canada
formally withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol in 2011.[17]
Both the US and Canada are looking at
Voluntary Emissions Reduction schemes that they can implement
internally to curb carbon dioxide emissions outside of the Kyoto
Protocol.[18]
The perceived lack of progress has also led some countries to seek
and focus on alternative high-value activities like the creation of the
Climate and Clean Air Coalition to Reduce Short-Lived Climate Pollutants
which seeks to regulate short-lived pollutants such as methane,
black carbon and
hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) which together are believed to account for
up to 1/3 of current global warming but whose regulation is not as
fraught with wide economic impacts and opposition.[19]
In 2010,
Japan stated that it will not sign up to a second Kyoto term,
because it would impose restrictions on it not faced by its main
economic competitors, China, India and Indonesia.[20]
A similar indication was given by the Prime Minister of New Zealand in
November 2012.[21]
These defections place additional pressures on the UNFCCC process that
is seen by some as cumbersome and expensive: in the UK alone the climate
change department has taken over 3,000 flights in two years at a cost of
over ₤1,500,000 (British Pounds).[22]
Participant statements and conference activity
Statement by UN climate chief Christiana Figueres
Governments will decide how and timetable to reach an effective
universal climate agreement adopted in 2015 and to enter into force from
2020.
Christiana Figueres, the UNFCCC executive secretary: “The necessary
technology and policy tools are available to governments and societies,
but time is very short — only 36 months to reach a universal agreement
before 2015. What we now need is to urgently implement the decisions
that have been taken at the inter-governmental level and to further
strengthen actions already under way,” she said.[23]
Statement by New Zealand Prime Minister John Key
The
New Zealand government said it would not be signing up to a second
commitment to the
Kyoto Protocol, a decision criticised by the
World Wildlife Fund.
[24] Prime Minister
John
Key said New Zealand would not lead the way on climate change,
instead opting to be a "fast follower".[25]
Statement by Japanese Masahiko Horie
"Only developed countries are legally bound by the Kyoto protocol and
their emissions are only 26% [of global emissions]. If we continue the
same, only one quarter of the world is legally bound and three quarters
of countries are not bound at all."[26]
United Nations and UNEP: methane thawing from permafrost
The
United Nations gave a strong warning on the threat to the climate
from
methane in the thawing
permafrost. This has not yet been included in models of the future
climate. Permafrost contain 1,700 gigatonnes of carbon – twice the
amount currently in
the atmosphere. When it thaws, it could push global warming past one
of the key "tipping points" that scientists believe could lead to
runaway climate change.
UNEP called
IPCC to provide governments with the most up-to-date knowledge in
the next IPCC reports next year.[27]
World Bank
World Bank published a report in November 2012 demanding the moral
responsibility to take action on behalf of future generations. 4°C
warmer world must be avoided – we need to hold warming below 2°C. Even
with the current mitigation commitments there is roughly a 20 percent
likelihood of exceeding 4°C by 2100.[28]
The World Bank and the International Energy Agency warned that the
world is heading for unprecedented warming – of between 4°C and 6°C – if
trends are not reversed. That scale would result in droughts, floods,
heatwaves and fiercer storms, decline agricultural productivity, bring
plant and animal extinctions, and wide human migration.[29]
Youth
The first time in history an Arab country is hosting the U.N.
conference for climate change negotiations. Youth in more than 13 Arab
countries, launch the Arab Youth Climate Movement, a group established
to lobby the region's governments on an ongoing basis to take action
against climate change: “It’s basically our role as civil society to
make sure that the government is doing its best to provide us with the
best quality of life and it’s our right as human beings to ensure a
healthy future for us and generations to come."[30]
The New Zealand Youth Delegation heavily criticised its own
government at the start of the conference, saying New Zealand's
withdrawal from a second period of commitment under the Kyoto Protocol[31]
was "embarrassing, short-sighted and irresponsible". New Zealand
received two 'Fossil of the Day' awards for "actively hampering
international progress".[32]
Friends of the Earth International
"An open letter to governments and their negotiators" posted on
Friends of the Earth International's website stated, "To really address
climate change UNFCCC-COP18 should decide to leave under the soil more
than 2/3 of the fossil reserves."[33]
Greenpeace
Lauri Myllyvirta from
Greenpeace Nordic states that the key reason we are heading for 4°C
of warming is coal burning. Massive expansion in the use of coal has
caused more than two thirds of the increase in global CO2 emissions in
recent years. Also the World Bank made plea for governments to avoid 4°C
Warmer World. No new coal plants were constructed in Europe after 2007,
but 1,200 coal plants are now being planned elsewhere: they can be
stopped.[34]
The EU spent two thirds of its energy research funding on nuclear
technologies in 2011. Some countries maintain direct subsidies to oil
consumption and coal mining. Others are providing decisive economic
benefits to nuclear, oil and gas installations by legislation
socialising the costs of accidents and of decommissioning. According to
Greenpeace removing these subsidies and imposing environmental taxes
would increase the cost and price of old energy supplies, and make
energy efficiency more profitable.
[35]