Renew On Line (UK) 29a

Extracts from the Jan-Feb 2001 edition of Renew
These extracts only represent about 25% of it

13. Forum

As a special extra for this issue of Renew On- Line, we’ve included part of the Forum section, in which wider views on current issues are expressed..

What really happened at COP-6?

As someone who used to work for the UN Climate Change secretariat, before joining EERU, Stephen Peake, who was at COP-6, sees it rather differently from the media.

This year’s COP was gate crashed by a new gang. The hotel breakfast meetings and lunchtime special events were buzzing with armies of consultants, bankers and financial risk strategists seeking CDM projects and setting up trading platforms for carbon offset credits. At the same time, the global media seemed much more knowledgeable on the key issues against a background of snowballing public awareness. The party is getting bigger.

The heart of COP-6, the political horse trading segment, lasted just around 80 hours - from Wednesday 22 November (the second week) until the final press conference at 17.58 on Saturday 25th November when a weary and utterly disappointed Jan Pronk (Dutch Environment Minister and President of COP-6) gave the final CO- 6 press briefing.

The first week saw the Subsidiary Bodies (the technical sub-groups) attempt to simplify COP’s job by sharpening areas of consensus and disagreements into consolidated text. The traditional way to approach such matters in the UN is to use square brackets. During any COP, it is vital in the first week that the civil servants managing delegations ensure to leave enough strategically placed square brackets in the texts associated with the various agenda items to allow the Politicians who fly in for the so-called "high level segment" to horse trade. The build up to a COP is in effect a stage-managed disagreement, followed, hopefully, by an apparently adlibbed reconciliation. Now a few strategically placed brackets are vital for achieving a negotiated outcome - no brackets, no high level work to do. But over 500 is simply too many for civil servants and it seems, even politicians to cope with. COP-6 was bracket city.

It’s therefore no surprise that COP-6 failed. COP-6 was billed by the secretariat as "make or break" time. In reality, COP-6 was never going to be either of these outcomes. Had the negotiators simply run out of time - or had they let time run out? Or was the classic back pocket plan, to suspend COP-6 until 2001, the least worst outcome compared with the compromises negotiated over the course of the Friday?

The make or break mindset is looking tired and inappropriate just now in the context of the climate negotiations. Our great climate experiment started a century and a half ago and at the very least we are only half way through it. Kyoto itself is another case of an unnecessarily and overly dramatized global "high-noon" negotiated at the last minute by exhausted politicians and civil servants. Less haste, more speed. Many believe that had the Berlin Mandate (which led to Kyoto) been stretched for another year, we might be closer to entry into force of a binding Kyoto Protocol by now, instead of having spent the last three years arguing about the definitions of a forest and a tree. Some of the biggest political stumbling blocks at the Hague have their roots (literally!) in the last minute developments in the negotiation of the Kyoto agreement - the CDM and sinks in particular.

It might just be because COP’s tend to come in November, but they seem to have evolved into pantomime environmental diplomacy - or at least that is the impression you get from media reports. Talk of one side or other in the climate negotiations trying their best to exploit various loopholes is at best over-simplistic caricaturing and at worst downright damaging to the political process and certainly to public understanding and participation on the climate change issue.

The truth is always more subtle. The scenes of crowds baying for some climate blood - as if governments alone and not us are the cause of our energy consumption - sends shivers down my spine. The view from the inside of negotiations is often in fact quite the opposite of what it seems on the outside. The now archetypical COP headline "Big bad dirty industrialized country seeks all means to do nothing about global warming" is a level of nonsense that distorts public understanding of the politics of climate change that we would not tolerate in describing the science.

I agree whole heartedly with Pronk when in the final press conference he dismissed talk of delegations seeking to exploit "loopholes". Most, if not all of the disagreements between developed and developing countries (and within the OECD block itself) can be explained by differing senses of urgency and timescale and not by environmental credentials or philosophy. Some want carbon offset markets up and running next week and think only of the first commitment period (2008-2012). Others see the longer-term game - noticeably, some experts and delegations at COP-6 were for the first time focussing more specifically on life in the second and third commitments periods.

One thing does puzzle me though - why did it take the NGOs three years to finally get themselves up and organized against "Kyoto Forests" and nuclear in the CDM? NGOs were highly effective in the run up to and during COP-6. If they had got themselves sorted in 1998, or even 1999, delegations might have paid more attention earlier.

But I can’t help feeling sorry for poor old Pronk. He’d invested a great deal in COP-6 and in fact did a grand job. Since early 2000 he had worked diligently to prepare for his role as President of the COP. Already back at COP-5, Pronk had decided that the main theme (COP presidents try to have themes) of COP-6 was going to be about education, training and public awareness on climate change. His judgement was impeccable. Until COP-6, Article 6 of the convention on climate change (dealing with education, training and public awareness) had been one of the most overlooked in the negotiations. Pronk realized, however, it was perhaps the most important and the one card he could play to embarrass all sides into making compromises at COP-6 in the face of literally hundreds of technical roadblocks in the documents.

Pronk had the foresight to appreciate that environmental diplomacy alone will not stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations. Somewhere the diplomacy must connect with reality - with local economies and peoples lives around the world. None of this was lost on the Government of the Netherlands. So President Pronk seized the day and put on the best COP show yet. Pronk had even hired the services of a perception management company to manage the event down to the smallest detail (sand bags on the podium, bicycles and scooters for delegates etc etc). From the opening session to the final press conference, it was an impressive and unprecedented exercise in public outreach.

COP-6 isn’t finished yet and neither is Jan Pronk. He's now got our attention. And in the mean time, while the top-down international environmental diplomacy continues, we all have a chance to examine our own energy consumption and lifestyles.

Stephen Peake