Climate – “We cannot only rely on the UN process”

Green MEP Bas Eickhout after the UN Summit in Durban

The Durban Climate Summit that ended last Sunday, hardly hit the headlines. And if environmental organisations and Green parties found a few positive points, like the EU taking back the initiative, that is partly because, as a famous environmentalist once said, when talking climate, humanity has no other option than optimism.

The outcome: legal and funding measures meant to limit climate change to 2 degrees Celsius, to be adopted by 2015 and implemented from 2020, is hardly what we hoped for in the run-up to the Copenhagen summit in 2008, when hopes of an ambitious successor to “Kyoto”, which ends in a fortnight, were still high. But after world leaders just didn’t smash each other’s heads before leaving, and two more summits didn’t bring a substantial breakthrough, the result isn’t very surprising.

The World Wildlife Fund is downright bitter. Durban “leaves us with the prospect of being legally bound to a world of 4C warming”, said WWF’s head of Climate Change Keith Allott, which is “catastrophic for people and the natural world”.

Greenpeace is hardly more positive. « World leaders should be ashamed they left without a major breakthrough » said Kumi Naidoo, executive director for Greenpeace International. Giving big emitters like the United States a way out of a legal agreement could, « if that loophole is exploited, be a disaster. »

Neither, however, could deny that on the diplomatic level some moves were made. Whereas “governments like the US, Japan, Russia, and Canada, consistently resisting raising the level of ambition”, the WWF comment sand  ”the US, afraid of the politics at home, fought over a few words, missed the bigger story”, “one crumb of comfort” was provided by “the emergence of a large group of high ambition countries, led by the most vulnerable nations and small island states, including many in Africa”.

Another crumb was the role of the EU. As Sandrine Bélier, a Green Member of the European Parliament, said: “nous pouvons être fiers d’être Européens et d’avoir su imposer la nécessité d’une vision globale des traitements et mécanismes nécessaires à la lutte contre le réchauffement planétaire; d’avoir su imposer une vision de solidarité Nord-Sud dans les discussions. Nous pouvons être fiers de la position responsable et moteur de l’Union Européenne sans laquelle aucune décision, aussi insuffisante, soit-elle n’aurait été possible.” 

Her colleague Bas Eickhout, who represented the Greens/EFA on the official European Parliament delegation,  however, stressed that the Union, if it wants to be credible, must increase its emission reduction target from 20 to 30 percent by 2020.  And “what has become clear” he added,  is that we can not only rely on the UN process but must also find other ways to spur climate action to respond to the growing emergency of the climate challenge.”  Although the “outcome has opened a door to more effective international response to climate change, delaying comprehensive global climate action until after 2020 is clearly insufficient, given the urgent action scientists say is needed to avoid dangerous climate change.”