Last week I started to identify, in no particular order of importance, those vital lessons that should be learnt from the recent United Nations Framework Conference on Climate Change held in Copenhagen, Denmark, which are needed for a careful evaluation of the LCDS and the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the Government of Guyana and the Government of the Kingdom of Norway. So far I have highlighted three lessons.

First, the achievement of virtual unanimity among the 193 nations present at the summit on the scientific specification of the environmental dilemma Planet Earth presently faces. This is truly important as there are sections of global opinion, particularly in the United States, which still dispute whether 1) climate change and global warming are occurring, and 2) if they are occurring, whether they can be attributed to human activity. Second, despite the gravity of the environmental dilemma all countries face as they seek to negotiate a global solution, nations are by choice or force of circumstance still proceeding on the principle of seeking maximum benefits for themselves, while yielding minimal national concessions. The protection of national interest guides negotiations rather than a genuinely cooperative and collective approach to global problem solving. Third, with this approach power and influence effectively determine outcomes more than cooperation and reasoning.
More lessons

A fourth lesson, which should be added to these is that, regrettably, the poor countries are seen by the major powers as important to the process in so far as they can contribute to a reduction in CO2 emissions by pursuing a low carbon path (which rich countries themselves are not doing) or carbon sequestration (as in the case of Guyana through forest protection). This attitude reinforces the gross asymmetry created by the environmental dilemma. That is, climate change and global warming will have the most disastrous consequences on poor countries. They, however, have the least resources, technology or capacity to mitigate or adapt to the negative global affects on their populations. Solving the global climate crisis therefore, involves fundamental issues of fairness and global justice.

Associated with this lesson is the implicit, if not explicit,  recognition at the Copenhagen summit by participants that unless rich countries fundamentally alter their patterns of domestic production, exports and consumption (including imports), the target of a less than a 2 degree Celsius average increase in global temperature over pre-industrialisation levels will never be achieved. Current life-styles in rich countries are very dependent on the utilization of fossil fuels ― the main source of CO2 emissions in the global atmosphere. In this sense, therefore, what Norway does to reduce CO2 from all its economic activities as listed above, is far more important than what offsetting contributions Norway can buy from Guyana so that it could continue with its business as usual way of producing humongous contributions to CO2 emissions through its fossil fuels exports. Later, I shall discuss in greater detail the issue of offsetting and thus the net effect of Norway’s reduction of CO2 emissions, which contributes to remedying the global temperature crisis.
Climate debt owed

to poor countries

A fifth lesson is that, when we consider the present levels of CO2 emissions in the atmosphere, we find that the accumulated stock is disproportionately greater than the net additions to that stock (flow). This means that all the historic polluters, without exception, owe the poor nations a huge ‘climate debt.’ This ‘climate debt’ was not adequately acknowledged at the Copenhagen summit, signalling a major conceptual and strategic failing on the part of poor countries, despite their numbers to get this point of view fully integrated into the conference proceedings.

The basic reason for their failing is that the rich countries were able to shift the discourse away from the ‘climate debt’ and onto the pledges and promises they were making to provide funding for poor countries to engage in adaptation and mitigation strategies to cope with the effects of climate change and global warming. They assured that these would be added to pledges committed to REDD and REDD plus programmes for poor nations with significant forest covers. These promises of funding clearly blunted efforts to position the climate debt, which rich nations owe to poor ones, at the front and centre of international negotiations on what contributions rich and poor nations should make towards resolving the global climate crisis.
Hijacking the climate

talks from the UN

The sixth lesson to be considered in this week’s column follows directly from the one just considered. In addition to the non-acknowledgement of the climate debt, the rich countries were able to manoeuvre two further financial manipulations. One has been the mis-attribution of promised/committed official development assistance (ODA) to poor countries and their pledged funding in pursuit of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) with the promises now being made to provide climate funding.

Regular readers of these columns would recall that in my earlier analysis of the CARIFORUM-European Union (EU), Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) I pointed out that the EU had proposed a large funding programme of Aid-for-Trade (AfT) to all developing countries in an effort to kick-start the bogged-down World Trade Organization’s negotiations at the time of the Hong Kong Ministerial Conference of the WTO (2005). Years later, these already promised Aid-for-Trade funds to the WTO re-appeared as the carrot to encourage the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) grouping of countries to sign on to the EPAs. In other words the AfT was morphed into EPA funding. This is a dishonest practice, which rich countries have been pursuing for the past half-a-century, and more particularly the European ones.

The second manipulation is that although climate change and global warming are being negotiated under the United Nations framework, where poor countries because of their numbers have some scope to influence the process it can be seen that, there are ill-disguised efforts underway to have the World Bank emerge as the institution for administering rich countries’ climate funding. Given the past tortured history of relations between the World Bank and poor countries, some of the more discerning developing nations are making it known that they would prefer the United Nations to create its own financial mechanism for administering all climate funding provided under the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change.

There remain several other lessons to be learnt. I shall consider more of these next week.