Disaster looms for Africa as the UN climate change conference in Durban – COP17 – failed to achieve any significant movement towards a new global treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. While an interim pledge was agreed upon to draft a new treaty by 2015 that could kick in by 2020, it is so weak as to actually render COP17 a failure. And Africa stands to pay the price.
As the UN climate change circus packs up and heads out of town the world is left no better off, with smaller, developing and poor countries, especially in Africa, still heading headlong to disaster. Two weeks of acrimonious bickering in front of the world’s news cameras and millions of dollars spent on travel, accommodation, entertainment, lavish dinners, road shows, side shows and heavens knows what else, delivered almost nothing of note. Climate change has become a massive industry in its own right that has to be kept alive by hook or by crook, and effective, binding agreements to combat global warming are not to get in its way. UN officials and delegates from some of the major economies are patting themselves on the backs, saying progress was made at COP17 in Durban towards replacing the Kyoto Protocol with a new binding international treaty to force countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. What they were getting excited about was a last-minute, weakly worded “agreement” that included the recalcitrant squabblers, the US, India and China, in which the parties promise to draft a new global emissions treaty by 2015, but which will not take effect before 2020 at the earliest.
Even if it is implemented after 2020, it will take at least another decade or more for its effects to start kicking in. By that time global temperatures – with those in Africa being higher than elsewhere – are likely to have risen to the point where massive devastation will already have set in. It is estimated that up to 180-million people in poorer countries are at risk of dying as a result.
Much is being made of the fact that the US, India and China were brought on board and that other major economies, like the EU, extended their commitment under the Kyoto treaty from 2012 to 2015. However, EU countries are bound by EU law to reduction targets similar to that of Kyoto, so it makes no difference. And India and China only came on board after the wording of the interim deal was sufficiently weakened to avoid strict policing and leave them a lot of interpretative leeway.
And the US, which has never subjected itself to reducing its emissions and is not bound by the Kyoto Protocol despite being the world’s biggest polluter, still insists that China and India should be treated the same as the US before it will subject itself to a treaty. However, China and India in turn insist that that would be unfair as they are new polluters developing their economies to reduce poverty, while the US is a historical polluter and is already a developed economy. They refuse to be scapegoated for the historical sins of the US and other developed nations who have been responsible for the most climate change damage in the past. Come 2015 or 2020 and these issues are likely to still put a spanner in the works.
And the global climate change fund Africa has been crying out for and which is essential to assist poorer, lesser developed nations to deal effectively with climate change, both through mitigation and adaptation, also did not materialise. The best the developed, wealthy nations – the major polluters for whose bad practices poor nations such as those in Africa will be paying the price - could come up with was a pledge to establish a fund that would guide the flow of much of what they hoped would be US$100-billion in annual pledges by 2020 to mitigate the impact of climate change in poor countries. By then it will probably be much too late in many instances, even if the fund does ever come into existence.
Even though COP17 took place in Africa, and although the African delegations came well armed with facts, figures, projections and impassioned pleas, they were once again made to stand at the kitchen door while the rich, developed nations and the new cash-flush kids on the block, China and India, partied futilely into the night.
Environmental activists and representatives from developing and smaller, poorer countries have labelled COP17 a failure and the last-minute “agreement” as allowing for far too long a time-line of action, being weak, and one that can easily be ignored by the major economies responsible for most of the world’s emissions. Despite the delegates’ best efforts, the world continues to become a deadlier place each and every day.
