Countdown to Copenhagen: climate talks face deadlock

By: Patricia Faustino on November 24th, 2009

In recent weeks, the Philippines was battered by a slew of tropical storms that left hundreds of people dead and cost billions of pesos in damage. The disasters have been partly blamed on climate change, and yet, even if all Filipinos stopped burning fossil fuels that warm the earth’s atmosphere, this would not be enough to save the country from worse consequences.

According to the World Resources Institute (WRI), the Philippines accounts for a mere 0.30 percent of the world’s carbon emissions despite the fact that it is the 12th most populous nation on earth. This means that the average Filipino generates less than a ton of carbon emissions per year, or less than what an average citizen from a developed country produces in a month.

In the last 150 years, about 60 percent of carbon emissions came from the small population of 12 percent living in the United States and Europe, data from the WRI shows. In contrast, only 24 percent of emissions came from the much greater majority of 80 percent living in poor countries.

“Which countries are historically responsible for climate change? The rich countries have been spewing emissions since they begun to develop at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution,” says Bernarditas Muller, a retired Filipina diplomat and coordinator of G77 plus China, the largest bloc of 132 developing nations in the climate talks. “But now that we poor countries have begun to develop, we are constrained because of climate change,” she added.

Despite the average Filipino’s small carbon footprint, he will most certainly be trampled by the effects of climate change. The 2009 Global Assessment Report of the United Nations’ International Strategy for Disaster Reduction ranked the Philippines as the 12th among 200 countries analyzed for risk to tropical cyclones, floods, earthquakes, and landslides.

Experts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which provides scientific advice to the UN, have predicted that natural disasters such as storms and hurricanes will become more intense as the globe gets warmer.

40 percent cut

Given the country’s small role in causing global warming but high vulnerability to climate change, the Philippines has joined the G77 in demanding that rich nations ramp up targets for reducing carbon emissions, as part of a new international agreement that will be finalized by world leaders next month in Copenhagen, Denmark.

“We are working on an agreement that will decide the fate of this generation and future generations.  Climate change is a long-term problem so you have to have long-term solutions,” says Muller. But with less than a month to go before Copenhagen, poor and rich countries still have key disagreements on which countries should cut emissions, by how much, and when.

The new agreement is a follow-up to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that set binding targets for 37 industrialized nations and the European Union to cut their carbon emissions by a collective 5 percent below 1990 levels, during the first commitment period from 2008 to 2012. The US famously refused to adopt the Kyoto treaty, even though it was the world’s largest carbon emitter at the time.

Both the US and EU have argued that any new agreement should require major developing economies like China and India to reduce emissions. The huge populations and fast growth of these two countries in recent years have made them the world’s first and fourth top carbon emitters at present.

“We are all emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The atmosphere doesn’t care where it’s coming from. We cannot go on seeing emissions increase in developing countries as they have at the moment. We are hoping to get developing countries to reduce the trend so we fall below business as usual,” says EU climate spokesperson Karl Falkenberg.

The Philippines and other developing nations are calling on rich nations, because of their historical role in causing global warming, to assume the heftier obligation by reducing 40 percent of their emissions from 1990 levels by the year 2020. The target is based on estimates from IPCC scientists on the necessary action to avoid the most disastrous consequences of climate change.

“Every country has a responsibility to address climate change, but those countries that created the problem should take a leadership role,” says Atty. Tony La Viña, Dean of the Ateneo School of Government and a key Philippine representative to the international climate talks. “But so far, their promises are far from what we need.” he added.

So far, Norway is the only industrialized nation to have agreed to cut 40 percent of its emissions by 2020. Japan and the European Union have announced cuts of 25 and 30 percent from 1990 levels by 2020.   The Kerry-Boxer climate bill currently pending in the U.S. Senate will target reductions of 20 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.  But because emission levels in 2005 were much higher than in 1990– the standard baseline year used in the climate talks– this is actually far less ambitious compared to other countries’ targets.

Small carbon footprint

Developing countries assert that industrialized nations have consumed more than their fair share of the earth’s resources over the past century, and are therefore obliged to assume most of the carbon cuts.

“This is not just about cutting emissions. Rich countries need to completely transform their production and consumption lifestyles. They complain that this will hurt their industry profits. But what other choice is there?” says Muller.

The developing world sees the stance of rich nations as an attempt to dodge their legal and moral responsibilities to climate change victims.

“There needs to be differentiation between the countries that created the problem, and the countries that are largely victims of problems they did not create,” says Chinese climate envoy Ambassador Qingtai Yu. “The per capita emissions of China are around four tons per person per year, or just roughly one third the per capita emissions of developed countries. Being born a Chinese should not give me a limited entitlement to the atmospheric space, relevant to that of a person born in a developed country,” he adds.