Over the last couple of days, we’ve been blogging from the Chatham House conference – Climate Change: Politics versus Economics.
As the conference made clear, there is growing consensus about what a full-term solution to climate change would look like: concentrations kept below 450ppm or even a shade lower.
This target allows some fairly easy sums to be done. How much can we emit to keep below those limits? When will emissions need to peak? How far will they need to decline from this peak?
IPCC answers for these questions are a peak by 2015, with a decline of as much as 85% by 2050.
Add to that a professed commitment by leaders to get a deal on a post 2012 framework in place by 2009 – and you have a clear and demanding ‘signal from the future’.
That matters. It allows politicians to begin to understand the deal they will be required to make. It helps them build the alliances at home that will give them credibility on the world stage.
It also gives them an idea of the how much climate change is likely to happen – what level of risk they need to prepare for, how much resilience will be needed against future changes.
This is particularly important for developing countries. I firmly expect them to play a much bigger role in the climate change debate over the next year or so.
At the moment, the strongest voices on climate change (Merkel, for example) come from the developed world. More recently, the big emerging economies have become increasingly influential voices.
There is a line that says that that extends the circle far enough – 30 or so emitters make up 90% or so of global emissions. Why bother with countries that emit less than 1% of the world’s total?
The answer is that developing countries are important not because of their emissions, but because of they will bear the brunt of unchecked climate change.
Take people who already experience unforgiving climactic conditions and who have so few reserves that they live their lives on a knife edge. Add extra stress. The likely consequences are obvious…
That’s why I think we’ll soon see the emergence of new voices from the developing world, able to talk with real authority about why the big emitters need to act swiftly to curb their emissions.
These moral arguments may be the only thing that can cut through the deadlock as the EU and US, say, argue about who should bear the burden of shifting to low carbon energy sources.
I see one obstacle to this happening. At the moment, developing countries have far too little information about what climate change will mean to them.
The science is moving quickly, as is our understanding of the economics. Take a country like Nigeria. It faces desertification in the mainly Muslim and desperately poor North; inundation in the oil-producing and conflict-ridden South.
It would be fascinating to see the briefing that President Yar’Adua has received on climate change following his recent election. But I’d bet that no-one has yet run Nick Stern’s models on the Nigerian economy; attempted to work out what the latest science means for Nigeria’s climate; or started discussions about what kind of 2012 framework would be in Nigeria’s national interests.
This is information that Yar’Adua, and his counterparts across Africa, will need if he comes to September’s UN high level meeting on climate change. Without it, he won’t be equipped to put represent the interests of the continent’s most populous country.
If I was UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon (thank God, I’m not) my overriding priority for September would be to rally Yar’Adua and his ilk, ensuring they are well-prepared for the event, make best use of the platform, and have access to the media to amplify their messages.
Ban has nothing to gain from running a G8-lite. But he could start thinking about the UN’s ‘responsibility to protect’ the vulnerable and use that to give his event – and his lacklustre and scandal-ridden institution – some clout on the one of the world’s most pressing and complex political issues…
[More in part 2]
