CLIMATE CHANGE
SITANON JESDAPIPAT
As interest in climate change grows stronger after numerous extreme climatic events, Poznan, Poland, has become visible perhaps for the first time on the world map. This is because the next round of climate change negotiation will take place there in December. Poznan is only a brief stop before Copenhagen next year, when negotiators want to continue taming the global rise in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by a new protocol to continue in a timely manner the Kyoto climate regime.
When world leaders gather in Poznan, we all will be reminded of what an unusual time in history we are now living in. Though the climatic impact has yet to be fully revealed, weather abnormalities, like large-scale earthquakes, for example, are growing common, adding to the unfortunate plight of people in places like Pakistan and China. Unlike these natural disasters, climate-related events are conceived and increasingly accepted as largely human-induced. Impacts of climate change, therefore, should not be termed unfortunate. The question is: how can the world community promptly and adequately respond to ensure climate equilibrium, say within the 2-degree Celsius range, so that the objectives of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in ensuring sustainable development and food security are not undermined.
One of the complications to that is not the question of cost, as Sir Nicholas Stern's review has revealed for us, but how it can be shared so that both efficiency and equity are ensured, and perhaps accommodated in the post-Kyoto regime.
This task is certainly not easy for a number of obvious reasons. The first reason relates to how politics has been played out on the global stage. There is little knowledge about why negotiators and politicians take the stand that they do, persistently and, seemingly, irrational. How, for example, are domestic politics translated and influencing national governments' global political stance? Why do politicians say what they don't mean? It is not easy to prove the ''obvious''. But the most obvious is: since the conception of the Kyoto Protocol, the very low binding Kyoto target will be missed by 2012, and more melting of ice caps will continue.
The second reason is the continuation of the ''head-banging'' or ''finger-pointing'' game of negotiation between developed and developing countries, each side talking themselves into a corner. ''Real'' politics dictate that a compromise must be reached, somehow.
The question is how, and how will the Copenhagen Protocol be able to accommodate this? What kind of concessions will be seen from Poznan to Copenhagen?
Talking about ''real'' politics is necessary, not only because the US might be coming back to the table if Barack Obama takes office, but also because we are beginning to see a global political power shift.
The failure of the Doha round of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks _ or even the collapse of Cancun in 2005 _ produces only one positive outcome. That is, rich countries, especially the United States, no longer monopolise world politics. Power must be shared. The reasoning is even stronger as climate integrity and climate impacts are truly globally common.
The fact that BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) is gaining influence on the world stage is a good sign in that regard. These countries are colluding to send a strong signal to the rich countries that they are fed up with being pushed into a corner.
It is, however, difficult for BRIC, with the exception of Russia in this climate change context, to continue being free riders out of Copenhagen. How will they be dealt with, in the spirit of meaningful cooperation? What concessions can we think of? How can we broaden participation so that voluntary collaboration to arrest the temperature rise produces a win-win result?
The most difficult question is, perhaps, how the newly shared power can take us out of danger. This is crucial as there are still many gaps to bridge: technology, knowledge, sharing the burden of the impact, and finance.
With this above reasoning, I do not believe we will conclude a Copenhagen Protocol next year. The power shift, the desperation of climate-related crises, the delayed Doha round, and last but not least, the Lehman Brothers crash, which is putting the world economy on the brink of collapse, will make negotiations in Copenhagen extremely difficult. The best I could imagine Copenhagen to produce is a half-cooked protocol, which contains only a skeleton of the complete architecture. The world is starting to prioritise challenges, and the future climate regime might appear at the bottom of the urgency list.
What could one imagine of the second best, or Plan B, then?
The only hope I can see is the sustainable development forum of the UN, and the Millennium Development Goals. Yes, it sounds like the world is getting nowhere. But this nowhere is somewhere that is already acceptable to most, if not all, of the members of the climate change community. Framing climate change within the sustainable development framework is also making climate change very practical.
Lastly, what does this mean for Thai land? I believe there are a few things Thailand could truly contribute to safeguarding the global climate system. Here is my purely speculative list:
- The sufficiency economy is a sustainable development plus. While we need to continue implanting it into our development plans and policy, and daily life, we can share with the rest of the world some lessons learned.
- We must broaden our participation in climate policy-making and carefully review our own position on global climate change response. In the longer term Thailand has only one option: it has to trek down a low-carbon development path. How can the broad-based participation effectively chart that future?
- Last, but not least, the looming and economic crisis should provide Thailand with new and fresh opportunities to revise its economic and social policies. But the bad news is, if domestic politics continues to play out as it is, any kind of dim light at the end of the tunnel may be a few generations away.
Sitanon Jesdapipat is an economist who has closely monitored the politics of climate change. He is founder of climate policy initiative of Sea Start, a global change research network, based at Chulalongkorn University.
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