All posts by COA Students

Posted:
December 6, 2011
Author:
COA Students

Who Are These Guys Anyway?

by Joe Perullo

I decided to do some investigating on who exactly the country delegates were.  Who hires them? Who are they really representing? What do they do outside of the UNFCCC? When we say the US is stalling progress and shoving responsibility onto developing countries, who exactly do we mean?  A lot of fingers are pointed at the delegates, but they’re just people, right?

The US was my case study, but I’m sure the basic structure (not to be confused with political agenda) can be applied to most countries.

As we know, the countries’ positions are determined long before the negotiations take place by foreign ministers.  In the US, this responsibility is given to the State Department, a department under the Executive branch (so the president has the ultimate authority). The delegates we see negotiating at COP are usually workers of the state department or people hired by it. Within the State Department, policies pertaining to the COP are done by the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs (OES).  This is where they lay out exactly what they want the text to look like coming out of a COP. Now, I’m sure they really do care about the environment, but keep in mind that any standpoints they want the delegates to make at COP need to get approval by the greater Department of State—who’s agenda isn’t confined to making international peace or saving the planet but to bettering the lives of Americans—and be signed by the Secretary of State, who is nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

The State Department’s official agenda is, as officially mentioned in the Foreign Policy Agenda, “to create a more secure, democratic, and prosperous world for the benefit of the American people and the international community.” In reality consideration of the international community is far from the top of the list.  The “american exceptionalism” of the country and its governments will not allow members of the house, who also need to think about re-elections, pass a bill that would let the country fall behind China in the green economy. And lets not forget about corporate lobbyist. Even if the OES and the delegates want nothing more than for the US to reduce emissions, they are at the whims of the State Department.

This is exactly what happened with the Kyoto Protocol—the US signed on to it but it could not be ratified through congress.  That signing was a clear “mistake” on behalf of the US COP delegates who negotiated such a protocol out, since it did not accurately reflect the actual will of the US to have legally binding emission reduction targets.  With this system, the delegates in some way “weren’t” doing their job.  I wouldn’t be surprised if they were released or given undesirable positions as punishment.

This gives American political environmentalists a tough choice: do they focus their energy in the international realm, where they can more tangibly deal with policies that affect the world, or in their own country, in an attempt to influence the internal struggles that determine when the true gavel is smashed in international negotiations?

Posted:
December 6, 2011
Author:
COA Students

Speak for Yourself

by Katie O’Brien

I cannot speak for anyone other than myself. It seems obvious—at least to me it does—because how can I speak on things I have not experienced myself? But this is exactly the problem with the UNFCCC process (and other processes as well but lets not go into that today): speaking on behalf of people. I suppose my statement wasn’t entirely true because in applying to be a Sierra Student Coalition delegate I was chosen (hopefully) with the confidence that I could accurately speak for and represent the SSC at these negotiations and in working groups. But I don’t think I can extend my power of speech beyond that. At the same time I feel like my voice is already represented and I feel that there are many others not represented. So I would like to speak for them but I cannot. I am privileged. I am a white, upper-middle class North American female who speaks English, has never had to worry about food, is able-bodied, of sound mind, and who goes to a private liberal-arts college in Maine. At the same time you can’t just boil me down to this. I am still a young person who cares about our future, I am a human and so I care about other humans’ lives and their experiences, and I am a being on this Earth who cares about what happens to its climate and to its biodiversity. My privilege has allowed me to speak about these cares but has silenced the voices of many South African youth and countless other peoples who have these concerns and more. And this is only within YOUNGO (the youth constituency). In the actual negotiations my voice is barely heard above the roars of those who represent me. So what about those who don’t even have the agency to come here and attempt to shout?

I suppose this is not a problem with all of the UNFCCC. I feel like many African and Small Island States are accurately representing their people’s sentiments. I’ve been to a few side-events with speakers from these areas and many of them reference their lives before being in government, back when they too were just people. They speak of their experiences in their lives of the effects of climate change where they are from. But like I said earlier, I cannot speak for them and really I have no idea what I am talking about. But as a Canadian and a pseudo-American, I can say delegations like the United States and Canada are not accurately representing their people. These delegates are listening to the corporations over the people; I suppose money is louder than real words. The delegates themselves are not to blame, the people did not choose the delegates, but someone the people thought represented them chose the delegates.

Maybe it sounds as if I am just going with the times of the Occupy movements, but I feel like this system is broken and I have for some time. I have felt for a long time that we need a more fair and accurately represented governing body. The system here is just as corrupted and convoluted as our political process at home because our politicians back home choose the people here.

Despite all of this I still am trying to work here and make a difference in some way. I am in the YOUNGO Water Working Group and we are working towards getting a larger focus on water, to us it seems to be only slipped in as footnotes and is ignored. But it has become apparent to us that this will take some time. Instead we hope to make some noise and establish this group and have a larger basis to continue this work. We have gained attention from other countries and organizations looking for the same thing and we hope we can use our unique position as youth to bring these issues to more light.

Is this worth it? If this is such a broken system shouldn’t we work to fix the system or create a new one?

I feel I have to think that it is worth it. Just as how I feel it is worth it to fight for climate justice in the United States despite how many people tell me it is dismal. I have to fight because I never know who might hear me screaming my lungs out at what seems to be just a blank wall of a building filled with deaf people. And I remember that I have so many people here at the negotiations and back home who care just as much as me and are working just as hard or harder at making sure people hear us. I have to work at this because if I don’t than why should any of them work on it? We can’t let things continue the way they have. We have to be loud and we have to work at these issues until we can say they have been solved. That means working on them in all theaters, within this broken convoluted system as well as outside so that maybe, just maybe something actually happens.

Posted:
December 6, 2011
Author:
COA Students

The Common African Position

by Samuli Sinisalo

By the end of the week, we will know what Durban will deliver. Durban is an African COP, and Africa will have a key role in determining the outcome. A united Africa is a strong force in the negotiations, as the rest of the developing world is likely not to challenge them. What is good for Africa, is good for the developing world.

In September the African Ministerial conference convened in Bamako, and issued a declaration with the key messages for the Durban negotiations. This three page document is really significant – if Africa stays true to it and pushes the goals together.

First, the Bamako declaration highlights the Millennium Development Goals, and how climate change puts further challenges on achieving them. They have not been extensively discussed in the UNFCCC in the past, but they might be in the future. Second, Africa wants the UNFCCC to maintain its status as the forum where climate decisions, based on science, are taken. The declaration also includes the principles of historic responsibility and common but differentiated responsibilities.

More specifically, the African ministers declared they want two separate outcomes from the negotiation tracks. On Kyoto Protocol, the wanted an amendment to Kyoto Protocol for a legally binding second commitment period from 2013 to 2017, with ambitious targets that keep the Annex 1 countries on track for 40% cuts by 2020 and 95% by 2050. In the second commitment period, market mechanisms could only count for 10% of the national emission reductions – rest would have to be domestic action. On the LCA track, the non-Kyoto Annex 1 Parties should take on comparable emission reduction objectives.

Further the Ministers wish to operationalize the Cancun institutions on adaptation, technology transfer and finance – all under the supervision of the COP. The Green Climate Fund should additionally have its own legal personality. On finance, they were concerned the private sector and about the division of funds between adaptation and mitigation. Adaptation needs are increasing by the minute, but private funds steer away, as relocating coastal communities is not as profitable as generating renewable electricity. The concern about fast start finance already seems futile, as the developed countries pledges are already falling short and there is no remedy in sight.

Last, but not least, I want to highlight the part of the Bamako Declaration which calls for maintaining a firewall between the developed countries legally binding mitigation commitments and developing countries nationally appropriate mitigation actions. The latter are conditional on financial support from the developed world. This has been the cornerstone of the UNFCCC for nearly two decades, but is now challenged in Durban as even some developing countries, including China, are ready to negotiate on this.

Some of the African countries are expected to diverge from the common position in the name of short term national gains. The last days will show whether Africa stands united until the end. Will they crumble? What will they compromise?

Posted:
December 6, 2011
Author:
COA Students

What’s health got to do with it?

by Graham Reeder

So how are climate change and health connected anyway? I don’t know about you, but the first thing that comes to mind when I used to think about climate change is arctic sea ice and major industry polluting. As I’ve developed a stronger interest in public health issues over the last couple of years, the human ecologist in me has driven me to make connections between climate change, social justice, and health. And guess what…I’m not alone. The wonderful thing about COPs is that if you’re passionate about an issue that relates to climate change in any way, you’ll probably find a group of people here who engage in it as well.

This year’s COP has actually been a big one for climate and health; Sunday saw a whole side conference on health and climate change and there have been many side-events and meetings about making that link. Unfortunately, my work following the adaptation negotiations has meant that I haven’t been able to go to most of those things, but I’ve had a number of great conversations with some of the people working on the issues.

Climate change has major impacts on health issues which vary from region to region. One helpful way to categorise our thinking about this is to think about extreme weather events and slow-onset events. Extreme weather events are things like hurricanes, floods, heat waves and drought, all of which are linked to climate change (See IPCC fourth assessment report working group II). What most of these events do is exacerbate existing health problems; when disaster strikes, it is consistently the least resilient who suffer most. This is because they have less access to preventative health care, emergency services, can be already suffering from some other under treated health issue, or are literally living in more dangerous locations (low-lying areas, along eroding coastlines, in urban hot-spots, etc…) All of these conditions make extreme weather events a serious concern for health. This is not to say that only the poorer countries of the world are affected, I don’t think I have to remind anyone that the heat-waves in Europe and Hurricane Katrina were a perfectly good reminder that inequality in resilience and access to services is ever-present in even the richest nations.

In terms of slow-onset events, media and international attention has a tougher time picking up the story. One might call it easy to gain wide readership of a front-page story about floods in Bangladesh that have killed thousands and cost up to 20 million USD over the last two years, but in a world where attention span is adjusted to twitter and everything is urgent, it can be much more difficult to expose the impacts of changing vectors on malaria patterns in sub-Saharan Africa or glacial melting causing water-access issues in Latin America, and of course the looming sea level rise issue that has low-level urban areas quivering in their boots. These long-term impacts will have catastrophic impacts on health unless serious work is undertaken pre-emptively to build resilience and strengthen communities’ ability to cope. I say cope because given what I’ve seen from the UN on adaptation policy progress, coping is the best we can hope for.  Some other climate related slow-onset events that are going to have major health impacts are ocean acidification, desertification, changes in salt-water/freshwater distribution, loss of traditional medicinal species, a major decrease in agricultural productivity, forest degradation, erosion due to changing rainfall, and mass migration due to environments becoming uninhabitable. I’ll touch on the migration piece in a future blog post, but all of these impacts have colossal health ramifications that most of the world’s infrastructures are completely unprepared to deal with. We have wasted so much time fighting about whether or not climate change is real and who should do something about it that it is coming around to knock us over from behind.

In short, the connection between climate change and health is a crucial one. Given the current ambition levels on the table and the likelihood of anything changing soon, it looks like we’re in for a whole lot of warming, and a proactive health/resilience centered approach is the only chance of dealing with this kind of catastrophe.

On a policy note, the most recent AWG-LCA (Ad-hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action) text has an addendum with, among other things, sections on building resilience; poverty and inequality; protecting and promoting human health; gender; territory, mobility, and urban development; and migrants. Most of the text in these sections involves looking into things and further investigating them rather than acting on the knowledge that is already there, but seeing this language in a text like this is a little bit refreshing. There is supposedly a new text coming out tonight or tomorrow, only time will tell if any of those sections remain.

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