While companies and citizens find ways to cope with climate change on the ground and push governments to swap fossil fuels for clean energy, officials negotiating a UN deal to curb global warming often appear stuck in a time warp, experts say.
At final talks before a Paris summit at the end of the month due to agree the new deal, South Africa’s top climate diplomat Nozipho Mxakato-Diseko told journalists climate change was a day-to-day reality for developing states and “a matter of life or death” for some.
Yet the discussions in Bonn seemed far off dealing with the impacts of worsening extreme weather and rising seas as an urgent threat, tripping up over procedural rows and the precise wording of a 51-page draft text to be taken to Paris.
Mxakato-Diseko, who chairs a key group of 134 developing states at the climate talks, insisted success in Paris would hinge on industrialised countries committing more public money to help poorer nations adapt to growing climate stresses and adopt renewable energy. But some climate change experts and developed-country negotiators see this as an old-fashioned view of the world.
The new agreement must reflect today’s reality
Insisting that rich governments alone pay to fix the consequences of their historically high carbon pollution symbolises what a European Union official described as “very rigid and somewhat outdated rhetoric”, dividing the world according to income levels in the early 1990s, when the bedrock UN convention on climate change was crafted.
“To be effective, the new agreement must reflect today’s reality and evolve as the world does,” said Elina Bardram, head of the European Commission team, at the October talks in Bonn.
That reality, experts say, means recognising that all countries, rich and poor, need to play a part in curbing planet-warming emissions by moving away from dirty energy sources and protecting their people from climate change impacts.
With China now the world’s top emitter of greenhouse gases, and India fourth after the United States and the European Union, efforts by major emerging economies to develop in a greener way are a centrepiece of the new accord now being stitched together.
Whatever is agreed at the Paris conference starting on November 30, the six-year process leading up to it has resulted in 155 governments submitting national climate action plans for the coming decades, including 114 developing countries. That in itself is a huge achievement, analysts say.
“The world has changed significantly, and Paris will be a recognition of that,” said Saleemul Huq, director of the Dhaka-based International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD).
Developing nations have made a big concession by putting forward plans to use more solar, wind and water power and to conserve forests, but there is a limit to how far they can shoulder more of the burden of curbing climate change, he added.
An analysis of the national climate action plans, released last week by the UN climate change secretariat, found that a quarter of the emissions reductions pledged are conditional on receiving financial and technical support to make them happen.
Meanwhile, expertise in preventing floods or building solar power systems is increasingly being shared across borders in the southern hemisphere, as well as between the north and south, along with funding to put those ideas into practice.
Until wealthy governments clarify how they will make good on a promise to mobilise $100 billion a year in climate change funding for vulnerable nations by 2020, the G77 and China group of developing countries is expected to continue using finance as a bargaining chip at the UN talks.