The climate clock is ticking, but civil society is still missing in action. With only nine months to go before the Copenhagen climate summit, the world’s NGOs are far from having a compelling set of demands to campaign on.
Perhaps it is already too late. Many governments are already ramping back their expectations of what can be delivered. The deal-makers among them now desperately need civil society to change the terms of debate and boost all countries’ level of ambition.
I’d give campaigners until April’s London Summit to get their act together. After that, they have zero chance of retaking the high ground and starting to shape the pre-Copenhagen agenda.
So what should their demands be? What makes a good headline ‘ask’?
First, it has to fit with the science – that means stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations at 450ppm CO2e (nothing lower is now possible).
Then, it needs to make sense to insiders – people who are making the major policy or investment decisions a clear sense of what they need to do now.
Third, it must communicate to a wider public – which means a goal that the average 12 year-old (or journalist) can understand and remember.
And finally, it needs to build climate into a wider post-meltdown narrative, offering an integrated vision for global recovery.
I think one clear, crisp demand fulfils all these criteria, providing a starting point from which all key elements of a global deal logically flow. Global greenhouse gas emissions exploded during the boom years, pumped up by debt-fuelled overconsumption. Now oil demand is declining – and we can expect global emissions see a modest fall too.
This provides civil society with a real opportunity. They should declare 2009 the year of peak emissions and challenge the world’s governments to develop a concrete plan to ensure they are never allowed to rise again.(more…)
In an interview with the FT yesterday, Wen Jiabao sets out China’s negotiating position in the run up to the Copenhagen climate negotiation. Three main points:
Green stimulus as part of the response to the financial meltdown.
Domestic action to increase energy intensity by 4% a year (“We failed to meet the targets in the first two years of the five year period, and we succeeded in meeting the target in 2008.”)
No quantified emissions targets for China – the country is still at an early stage of development and “in terms of per capita greenhouse gas emissions, we are certainly not the biggest one.”
How strong is China’s position? Not very, I think. China is obviously right to expect the rich world to do more, but if they accept tough targets and China refuses to, then there are two consequences. 450ppm stabilization becomes impossible – and it’s the rest of the G77 that will end up with a highly inequitable deal.
Assume a robust global deal on climate and the world’s cities will have to transform their infrastructure, economies and societies in little more than a generation.
Assume uncontrolled emissions growth and they face growing impact from a less hospitable and more volatile climate.
Either way – big changes are on the way. Few cities’ leaders grasp the scale of the challenge, especially in developing countries, where towns and cities will have an additional 1.5bn residents to cope with by 2030.
This new think piece has been prepared as part of the British Council’s Climate and Cities programme. Download the pdf (which has full references) or read the full text below the jump.
I’ve been in Japan today, speaking at ‘Reforming International Institutions – Meeting the Challenges of the 21st Century’, a seminar organized by the United Nations University and the British Embassy in Japan.
You can download my talk here (with pictures, references etc) – or the text only is available below the jump. There’s a webcast too.
Headlines:
It’s going to be a tough year. The financial meltdown has a long way to go, and the downturn is risking turning into a global depression.
Trade is a bell wether. Protectionist pressures are already on the rise. If they gain traction, take that as a warning of a wider loss of confidence in global institutions.
The unravelling of global economic imbalances could prove corrosive to the international order. If countries start to devalue to protect exports, expect a tit-for-tat dynamic to kick in.
Scarcity issues (energy, water, land, food, atmospheric space for emissions) remain the key medium term driver of global change. Commodity prices will spike again as soon as there’s recovery.
The downturn has stemmed the uncontrolled growth of emissions, but also lessened the chance of a robust global deal on climate.
Economic bad times could well drive increased conflict. A major new security threat might be the fabled black swan – hitting just when the global immune system is already overloaded.
If we experience a long crisis (or a chain of interlinked crises), we are likely to see either a significant loss of trust in the system (globalization retreats), or a significant increase in trust (interdependence increases).
You need to stretch time horizons to get the latter – shared awareness (joint analysis of risks and challenges), as a basis for shared platforms (loose coalitions of leaders), which can lobby for a shared operating system (a new international institutional architecture).
2009 sets a challenging agenda for the G20 (financial reform and economic recovery – but framed by a broader vision on climate, resources, security etc.)…
…the G8 (caucus of rich countries able to tee up Copenhagen and kick start development assistance if developing countries begin to teeter)…
…the UN (especially Ban Ki-Moon’s proposed high level ‘friend’s group’ on climate, but also as a fora for getting to grips with scarcity issues)…
and the Bretton Woods institutions and the WTO (first of all ensuring they keep their heads above water, then looking to ‘save globalization from itself’).
Oh and be ready for the backlash – people are angry and rightfully so, but that may well lead us down some populist blind alleys.
A while ago, a few beers drunk, I became embroiled in speculating about decidedly unconventional ways of controlling greenhouse gases. Two ideas lodged firmly enough in my memory to last until the next day: burning sheep and burying trees.
Now before any of you vegans start with the hate mail, I want to stress that this was a thought experiment. No lamb was subjected to even the lightest singeing. But you understand the logic…wouldn’t it be good if you had a machine that could range around marginal land (rather than attractive pasture) under its own steam, all the while turning biomass into a high-octane biofuel?
Use a sheep and you’d get wool as an additional by-product. Plus the UK proved the concept when it incinerated most of the cows in the country when BSE hit…
Tree burying seemed like a cheap and easy way of carbon sequestration (with technology that works today, rather than in twenty years’ time). Grow trees as fast as possible. Then throw them down a disused coal mine. Repeat ad nauseam. Of course, you’d get methane released as the trees rotted – but surely there’d be a way of sealing that in or tapping it off.
It turns out that tree burying isn’t such a bonkers idea – it’s just you need to bury charcoal instead. Or so I discovered today at a post-Poznan washup (hosted by IES, Globe and European Economic and Social Committee), where the best presentation of the day was from Craig Sams on biochar.
Craig founded the Whole Earth organic food brand and Green and Black‘s organic chocolate (both of which he has since sold). He’s now pushing charcoal as a low-tech solution to the climate change problem, working with Daniel Morrell, founder of the Carbon Neutral Company.
The world’s soil has lost a colossal amount of carbon due to centuries of intensive agriculture (accounting for about half of the current stock of atmospheric greenhouse gases).
You can take biomass (fast growing crops that you grow specially, coppiced trees or even the crud that gathers on the forest floor), and turn it into charcoal using pyrolysis (you get some energy too).
The char can then be added to soil (either in forests or on agricultural land), where it enriches it, reduces the need for nitrate fertilisers, and stores large quantities of carbon for the long-term (all, potentially, achieved through a myriad of grassroots schemes).
Craig dropped an eye-popping stat into his presentation. If all available land were devoted to biochar for just one year, then enough carbon could be sequestered to take atmospheric concentrations back to pre-industrial levels. Admittedly, we’d all starve for 365 days – but it shows the potential.
