Bali climate deal marks a geopolitical shift

Developing countries flexed their muscles in unprecedented ways at the climate talks, suggesting the old north-south power equation is changing.

from the December 17, 2007 edition

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Many longtime observers say it was the most stunning reversal they had ever seen at one of these meetings. And it showed that the old north-south divide at climate talks may be eroding, given the alliance between Europe and the G-77 plus China on the issue.

"They caved!" said an astonished Philip Clapp, deputy managing director of the Pew Environment Group, based in Washington. He suggests that in the end, the White House had too much to lose. A US-triggered collapse of talks here would likely have led European countries and others to boycott President Bush's Major Economies Meetings next year, Mr. Clapp says. If that were to fail, he continues, the administration risked handing Democratic candidates a powerful twofold criticism ahead of the 2008 elections: They could claim that Republicans stymied the UN process and that the president's own efforts had failed.

Bargaining on emission cuts

Hard bargaining over the past two weeks, as well as the last-minute theatrics, point to the tough bargaining that lies ahead. The aim is to approve a new agreement at talks in Copenhagen,Denmark in 2009 and get enough countries to ratify it so it can take over in 2013, when the Kyoto Protocol's first commitment period expires.

The road map also sets out guidelines for working on issues dear to developing countries – adaptation, transfer of technologies that will help their economies grow without loading up the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, and, finally, the setting up of financial arrangements to help pay for both of these. And key for industrial countries, the road map aims to look for ways to engage developing countries more fully in greenhouse-gas mitigation efforts.

But it emphasizes, albeit in a footnote, the magnitude of the challenge. According to the latest reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in order to hold global warming to about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, industrial countries must make a downpayment by reducing their greenhouse-gas emissions between 25 and 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. Developing countries will have to achieve a substantial but unquantified "deviation" from their business-as-usual emissions by then as well. To stay on track, industrial-country emissions will have to fall by between 80 and 95 percent by 2050. Developing countries will have to continue to ramp up their emission-reduction efforts during the same period.

The US had strongly objected to including those numbers in the road map's nonbinding preamble. As a compromise, a footnote refers to the volumes and page numbers where these figures appear in the IPCC reports.

Tackling adaptation early on

Since 2000, global-emission rates have outstripped all but the highest IPCC projections. Some global-warming effects are showing up earlier than models have projected. And energy demand, particularly in developing countries, is burgeoning.

As negotiators begin their work on a new agreement, the order in which they tackle issues will be important, says Yvo de Boer, who heads the office overseeing the Framework Convention on Climate Change.

In the first year, he says, it might be most useful to focus on adaptation and on what countries can do "from a technical point of view," to reduce emissions. "Once you know what you can do, in the second year you can focus on the technology you need to make that happen and the money that you are going to need to pay for the technology."

Putting the first-year focus on adaptation and mitigation, he continues, allows a new US president to enter the process with a better idea of what's possible as long as the technology and financing are available. Setting emission targets would cap the process.

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