The Forestry Code was instrumental in reducing deforestation rates. Deforestation although still not entirely sustainable has prevented the loss of a large amount of the Amazon forest. The proposal responds solely to the interests of the more traditional sector of the Brazilian agribusiness. Its main effect, if turned into law, would be to pardon illegal practices that led to deforestation and destruction of riparian vegetation that caused the erosion of river beds and drying of water sources. I’ve been to areas of soybean plantation where producers are desperate about water scarcity brought about by land clearing that destroyed all the previous vegetation, including the riverine, to increase agricultural area. Now rivers and sources are drying, and they’re left with no water for irrigation. In the future they’ll leave the land bare, and look for new areas to occupy pushing deforestation further into the Amazon and the savanna fields (Cerrado).

If approved, the proposal would do harm not only to the environment, but to the economic sustainability of competitive agricultural production in many areas. It benefits a traditional  mode of production that destroys the vegetal riparian protection of river banks and water sources; clears the vegetation that prevents landslides on steep hillsides; disregards the legal reserve of primary forest as a means to protect biodiversity. It is detrimental to a contemporary and competitive agricultural commodity business.

Large global buyers are banning all grain, beef and leather coming from land illegally cleared, or produced with the use of forced labor from their supply chains. In the Brazilian domestic market large retailers such as Walmart, Pão de Açúcar and Carrefour are also banning beef coming from areas of deforestation from their shelves. Major Brazilian exporters of leather goods will soon be forced to do the same.

The bill goes to the extreme of giving fiscal benefits to those who have illegally cleared their land and disrespected rules for the protection of riparian vegetation and primary biodiversity. Farmers who have obeyed all rules and paid a price for being legal will now see those who have thrived in illegality getting subsidized long-term finance to abide by far less demanding rules. Rules that will lead to the resumption of deforestation and destruction of river courses.

How can that happen? An alliance between a communist and the more conservative forces of the right linked to traditional rural practices of production and domination? How come the successors of the Brazilian latifundia can find political help from a supposedly left wing politician? How can a government led by a president who came from the progressive metalworkers union movement, leader of a labor-oriented party let such a bill follow its course unhindered? The government leadership is taking no action either to block or to modify a proposal that contradicts current government policies. It would, among other things, prevent the government from meeting the deforestation targets it has registered under the Copenhagen Accord. Several representatives of the Social-democrat opposition are also supporting the proposal or have adopted an attitude of benign neglect.

The Brazilian political system has some very specific features that help to explain such apparently surreal outcomes. Features that are hard to explain to foreign audiences.

Brazil has a presidential political system in which the President depends on a multiparty coalition to govern. I called it a ‘coalition presidential system’ a long time ago. It explains why president Lula is so uninterested on the fate of the Forestry Code. He has many traditional rural business sectors in his coalition that have a direct interest in changing the Code for their own benefit. The majority of the progressive forces in his coalition are not really interested in what happens to the distant Amazon region or the rich savanna fields of the Brazilian midwest.

Brazilian parties are two-headed entities, with a “national head” focused on presidential coalition politics, and a “regional head” focused on state and local politics. The Forestry Code is far more about regional and local interests than it is about general, strategic national issues. And this is also a measure of the little importance environmental issues have in the national political agenda. There is no place in the Brazilian party system for ideology or policy-oriented behavior. Parties are machines finely tuned to grabbing power and controlling the largest possible share of the national budget. All political dealings are led by the convenience of personalities, factions and their allies. Paramount among allies are business sectors that can provide resources to parties’ and politicians’ campaign finance; labor organizations that can provide loyal vote clusters; and organized sectoral lobbies controlling either money or vote pools.

Ideologies in this system are so fuzzy that ultra-right and ultra-left nationalists can easily coalesce to fight what they see as the perils of globalization. Retrograde business groups and opportunistic politicians who identify themselves as “progressive”, “communist”, or “socialist” can easily find common ground to justify their alliance. Ideological identifications are today no more than meaningless labels. That’s how a “communist” can staunchly defend the interests of landowners. Among the landowners to be benefitted there may be several who have had illegal or illegitimate access to land either by directly appropriating public land, or buying illegally grabbed land with fraudulent property documentation. Some of them are being prosecuted for the use of forced labor in their farms. The proposed version of the bill does not make any clear distinction between legitimate owners of legal land and land-grabbers.

The bill is presently at the stage of House committees review. After being voted at the House floor it has to be reviewed by the Senate. As we are approaching the campaign for general elections, including a presidential election, it is unlikely the bill could become law this year, under normal circumstances. Here lie the hopes of those who want to defend Brazilian forests and rivers: to obstruct the decision-making process and wait for the new correlation of forces that will come out of the elections. Seat turnover is likely to be very high this year: 100% of House seats and two thirds of the Senate seats are up for the grabs. Safe seats will be no more than 30% in the House. In other words only around 30% of the House are likely to get reelected. At least 60% of the Senate seats will change hands, a turnover of around 40%. Newcomers to the House can be as much as 50% of the total. We should also include in the renewal at least another 20% or 30% of seats that will likely be gained by former House members that did not run at the previous election or failed to get elected.

With the possibility of a power shift at the Presidency and a substantial change in party seat share in the Congress, the best strategy for those who oppose these changes to the Forestry Code should be to prevent the bill from being voted this year. The issues addressed by the bill will certainly be debated during the campaign and different points of view will become better known to the public. This would the best way to deal with the complexities and idiosyncrasies of the Brazilian political system.

The proposal responds solely to the interests of the more traditional sector of the Brazilian agribusiness. Its main effect, if turned into law, would be to pardon illegal practices that led to deforestation and destruction of riparian vegetation that caused the erosion of river beds and drying of water sources. I’ve been to areas of soybean plantation where producers are desperate about water scarcity brought about by land clearing that destroyed all the previous vegetation, including the riverine, to increase agricultural area. Now rivers and sources are drying, and they’re left with no water for irrigation. In the future they’ll leave the land bare, and look for new areas to occupy pushing deforestation further into the Amazon and the savanna fields (Cerrado).

The proposal does harm not only to the environment, but to the economic sustainability of competitive agricultural production in many areas. This mode of production destroys the vegetal riparian protection of river banks and water sources; clears the vegetation that prevents landslides on steep hillsides; disregards the legal reserve of primary forest as a means to protect biodiversity. It is detrimental to a contemporary and competitive agricultural commodity business. Large global buyers are banning all grain beef and leather coming from land illegally cleared, or produced with the use of forced labor from their supply chains. In the Brazilian domestic market large chains such as Walmart, Pão de Açúcar and Carrefour are also banning beef coming from areas of deforestation from their shelves. Major Brazilian exporters of leather goods will soon be forced to do the same.

The proposal goes to the extreme of giving fiscal benefits to those who have illegally cleared their land and disrespected rules for the protection of riparian vegetation and primary biodiversity. Farmers who have obeyed all rules and paid a price for being legal will now see those who have thrived in illegality getting subsidized long-term finance to abide by far less demanding rules. Rules that will lead to the resumption of deforestation and destruction of river courses.

How can that happen? An alliance between a communist and the more conservative forces of the right linked to traditional rural practices of production and domination? How come the successors of the Brazilian latifundia can find political help from a supposedly left wing politician? How can a government led by a president who came from the progressive metalworkers union movement, leader of a labor-oriented party let such a bill follow its course unhindered? The government leadership is taking no action either to block or to modify a proposal that runs against current government policies. It will, among other things, prevent the government from meeting the deforestation targets it has registered under the Copenhagen Accord. Several representatives of the Social-democrat opposition are also supporting the proposal or have adopted an attitude of benign neglect.

The Brazilian political system has some very specific features that help to explain such apparently surreal outcomes. Features that are hard to explain to foreign audiences.

Brazil has a presidential political system in which the President depends on a multiparty coalition to govern. I called it a ‘coalition presidential system’ a long time ago. It explains why president Lula is so uninterested on the fate of the Forestry Code. He has many traditional rural business sectors in his coalition that have a direct interest in changing the Code for their own benefit. The majority of the progressive forces in his coalition are not really interested in what happens to the distant Amazon region or the rich savanna fields of the Brazilian midwest.

Brazilian parties are two-headed entities, with a “national head” focused on presidential coalition politics, and a “regional head” focused on state and local politics. The Forestry Code is far more about regional and local interests than it is about general, strategic national issues. And this is also a measure of the little importance environmental issues have in the national political agenda. There is no place in the Brazilian party system for ideology or policy-oriented behavior. Parties are machines finely tuned to grabbing power offices and getting a fair share of the national budget. All political dealings are led by the convenience of personalities, factions and their allies. Paramount among allies are business sectors that can provide resources to parties’ and politicians’ campaign finance; labor organizations that can provide loyal vote clusters; and organized sectoral lobbies controlling either money or vote pools.

Ideologies in this system are so fuzzy that ultra-right and ultra-left nationalists can easily coalesce to fight what they see as the perils of globalization. Retrograde business groups and opportunistic politicians who identify themselves as “progressive”, “communist”, or “socialist” can easily find common ground to justify their alliance. Ideological identifications are today no more than meaningless labels. That’s how a “communist” can staunchly defend the interests of landowners. Among the landowners to be benefitted there may be several who have had illegal or illegitimate access to land either by directly appropriating public land, or buying illegally grabbed land with fraudulent property documentation. Some of them are being prosecuted for the use of forced labor in their farms. The proposed version of the bill does not make any clear distinction between legitimate owners of legal land and land-grabbers.

The proposal is presently under discussion by the House at the committee level. After being voted at the House floor it has to be reviewed by the Senate. As we are approaching the campaign for general elections, including a presidential election, it is unlikely the bill could become law this year, unless President Lula tells his leaders in Congress to give it urgency status. Here lies the hopes of those who want to defend Brazilian forests and rivers: to obstruct the decision-making process and wait for the new correlation of forcers that will come out of the elections. Seat turnover is likely to be very high this year: 100% of House seats and two thirds of the Senate seats are up for the grabs. Safe seats will be no more than 30% in the House. In other words only around 30% of the House are likely to get reelected. At least 60% of the Senate seats will change hands, a turnover of around 40%. Newcomers to the House can be as much as 50% of the total. We should also include in the renewal at least another 20% or 30% of seats that will likely be gained by former House members that did not run at the previous election or failed to get elected.

With the possibility of a power shift at the Presidency and a substantial change in party seat share in the Congress, the best strategy for those who oppose these changes to the Forestry Code should be to prevent the bill from being voted this year. The issues addressed by the bill will certainly be debated during the campaign and different points of view will become better known to the public. This should be the best way to deal with the complexities and idiosyncrasies of the Brazilian political system.

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill tells us a story of disregard for the risk of deep sea oil extraction, and bad risk governance. It reflects an overall failure to account for risk of environmental damage and the associated economic losses of deep sea oil drilling and extraction projects.

That the leakage continues uncontrolled 14 days after the rig explosion, on April 20, tells a lot about BP’s impact analysis of the operation, and quality control of the equipment leased. It also reveals the lack of technology to deal with that sort of leakage. Nobody knows how to stop such a leakage before it turns into a major disaster.

The environmental cost will be immense. Cleaning is not clean. It’s just a lesser evil. Dispersants are toxic and will have a negative impact on maritime and coastal environments.

Economic losses will be huge. The whole southern coastal economy will be affected. BP liabilities will probably be higher than those paid by Exxon in the case of the Exxon Valdez spill. The Exxon Valdez has been the most expensive oil disaster to date in the US. It also showed that environmental damage, always overlooked on risk assessments, unfolds for decades after.

The first lesson is that risk is higher than acknowledged. The second one is that technology provides neither adequate risk prevention, nor prompt damage control. The third lesson is that such disasters have long run consequences. They are not short-term events. The fourth lesson is that this kind of oil project has hidden costs.

“What is likely to become one of the most damaging spills in history unveils the hidden costs of our addiction to fossil fuels. The truth is, fossil fuels are injurious in so many ways — to our health, the environment and national security.” (John Podesta and Joseph Romm – “Limited Government can, and often does, lead to unlimited pollution and unlimited disasters”, Climate Progress.)

This cost does not enter any business plan, project estimate, risk and financial assessments. The hidden cost of risk – both environmental and economic – distorts pricing, particularly comparative pricing confronting oil to alternative energy sources. It doesn’t show in the price equation neither at the rig, or at the pump. Oil is more expensive than it appears because it is riskier. It has become even more so as we moved from on-shore traditional drilling to off-shore deep water exploitation. The markets and insurance companies should carefully consider these lessons before jumping at the rather unwarranted benefits of future pre-salt drilling. Hidden costs and real risks will be multiplied by a significant factor when moving from deep-sea to sub-salt drilling.

“The only effective strategy is strong regulatory oversight to prevent disasters in the near term. And getting off oil in the longer term.” (Podesta and Romm)

In Washington, safety considerations have already made President Obama to condition his decision to allow off-shore drilling to safety considerations. But he

“offered little in the way of concrete promises. He said he still believes that ‘domestic oil production is an important part of our overall strategy for energy security,’ but said ‘it must be done responsibly for the safety of our workers and our environment’.” (Dave Levitan, Solve Climate).

It is unlikely that a disaster of that magnitude would not have political aftereffects over the long run both in the US and abroad.

This accident makes a good case  for everybody to probe deeper into corporate sustainability claims. The credibility of sustainability reports and impact assessments has never been very high. The spread of this oil spill should remind everybody to not take corporate statements and reporting at face value. Sustainability actions should be not only reported, but designed in such a way that they could be reported, measured – through good and proven metrics – and verifiable.

Amidst a judicial battle around the hydropower dam of Belo Monte, in the Brazilian Amazon region, the government has hastily auctioned the project. The 7-minute long bidding is being contested at the federal courts.

There are four lawsuits, as of yesterday, to stop the project, and revoke the auction. The government has been able to suspend the injunctions and go on with the auction, but there has been no ruling yet by the Federal Court of Appeals on whether the whole process has been in accordance to the law and environmental rules. See Jeremy Hance story on the Belo Monte auction for Mongabay here.

Only 8 months before being replaced by a new administration, the government has bypassed rules and set all legal and policy precaution aside only to see the project auctioned. What has been puzzling many analysts, including myself, is why is President Lula fighting so stubbornly to speed up a project that clearly requires a more thorough technical evaluation on all grounds.

It is also intriguing why the government has refused to look at any alternative, even other hydro plants already planned. The project has raised doubts on economic, financial, energy efficiency, environmental, and procedural grounds. There is no justification for such a hasty implementation. The country will have a surplus of electric power of about 4,000 mW by 2013. Technological uncertainties may lead to skyrocketing maintenance costs. The dam is more than 1,000 km away from the grid. For its electricity to reach consumer centers the government will have to build a long and very costly transmission line. There are better alternatives within the grid area. The government has never done a comparative analysis of the costs and benefits of the Belo Monte plant against other hydro or wind power alternatives closer to consumer centers.

One of the Federal Prosecutor’s arguments is that the auction has specified a larger flooded area than allowed by the provisional environmental license. If the court finds that there is a difference between what was auctioned, what was licensed, it is likely that it will be revoked.

The environmental license itself is contested at the Federal Court due to several irregularities identified by the Federal Prosecutor. He has argued that it was granted by Ibama, the federal environmental agency, without a complete assessment of the dam’s environmental impact, as required by law. He attached documents showing that Ibama’s analysts wrote several memos stating that there were many technical points requiring clarification, before an appropriate assessment of environmental impact could be effectively made.

The project has a huge environmental impact, endangering forest reproduction over a 100 km long tract of the Amazon rainforest. It would also reduce the fish and water supply of local indigenous communities. Belo Monte is controversial on economic and energy security grounds as well. It is the less efficient electric power project under consideration in Brazil. It will cost over US$ 17 billion and would have to be almost entirely subsidized. The fiscal risk is very high. The maximum tariff adopted as a ceiling for the auction, of US$ 47.00 per kWh, is too low to make it financially viable to private investors. As a result, private investors have decided to participate only under the umbrella of state-owned companies. To circumvent private financial objections, the government has decided to organize consortia led by state-owned power companies. Private investors were invited to join as minority partners. The state-owned investment bank, BNDES, will provide highly subsidized finance for 80% of the project. The return on investment is so low that the pension funds of state-owned corporations the government wanted to bring to the consortia could not participate. ROI is smaller than the minimum set by the law that regulates pension funds.

The Belo Monte project was first released in 1979. Its original design was an environmental nightmare. Although subsequent redesigning has reduced its impact on the environment, it failed to remove its structural flaws. For the plant to be more efficient, the dam would have to be much larger, doing an unbearable damage to the Xingu river and to the Amazon forest. To minimize environmental damage, the project ends up with one of the lowest capacity to yield ratios in the Brazilian power sector. Its annual average power yield would be within the range of 3,500 mW – 4,500 mW, depending on the water flow, for an installed capacity of 11,200 mW.

Even for the plant to generate 4,500 mW annually, channels would have to divert a huge amount of the water flow into the dam. Upriver water availability would be severely compromised. Draining the river upstream would have important environmental consequences. A large portion of the rainforest in this region remains flooded for several months. The flood season coincides with the fruit season. Several species of fish enter the forest area when it is flooded and eat fruits, becoming major vectors for forest spreading and reproduction along the river banks. Depending on the water flow remaining upriver after the diverting channels are operational, most of the forest area would no longer be flooded and the forest would die. The level of remaining water would lead to imbalances on forest life and biodiversity. It would also negatively impact fisheries and the food supply of the local indigenous population. There is risk of spreading vector-borne epidemics, particularly malaria and dengue fever, because of changes in the distribution of water, drying upriver and flooding at the dam site. Levees would be necessary to reduce flooding in the rain season by water overflowing the dam.

Emissions of methane due to forest degradation and death were not counted as environmental impacts. The dam could also become a major source of emissions due to the large amount of organic sediment typical of Amazonian rivers.

The winner of the 7-minute auction was a loose coalition of companies, assembled only a few days before the bidding, and led by state-owned CHESF. The government agency in charge of auctioning, ANEEL, has made several last-minute maneuvers for the group to be entitled to register. Their bid of US$ 44.00 has been unanimously considered as untenable. It is consensus in the financial markets and in the electric power sector that even the US$ 47.00 set as ceiling by the government would not be profitable. Experts who are favorable to the project, although critical of the way the government is conducting the process, say that the minimum profitable tariff would be US$ 57.00, taking finance subsidy into account. O Globo newspaper columnist Miriam Leitão gives more details on the final dealings that led to this objectionable fast-track process. Her column, here, reveals several important aspects of the Belo Monte affair (in Portuguese).

The dominant groups in the Brazilian electric power sector – contractors, experts, consultants, government officials – refuse to even consider wind power as an alternative, in spite of the country’s obvious wind and solar power advantages. Brazil has only 600 mW of wind power installed capacity, compared to China’s almost 30,000 mW. China has increased its capacity by 13,800 mW in 2009, more than Belo Monte’s nominal capacity.

Only two experts, among more than a dozen interviewed in the Brazilian press, said that wind power should be considered as an alternative. The Brazilian energy establishment is so antagonistic to the idea of wind power, that there is no serious official inventory of the country’s wind power potential. There is only a very partial survey of on-shore potential. Recent academic research has estimated that Brazil’s off-shore potential is even greater than on-shore. There are indications that in some on-shore sites in the Northeastern states, and several off-shore sites, along the coast, installed capacity to effective yield ratios could be as high as 50%, compared to the commonly used 30% average. The difference has to do with the direction and strength of the wind during the day and the number of windy days in the year. But no official and systematic appraisal has ever been released.

Senator Marina Silva, the Green Party presidential candidate, has told me that Belo Monte should be reexamined and the government should conduct further public inquiries before it is thoroughly reviewed by Ibama, the federal environmental agency. The forerunner in the polls, the Social Democrat candidate, José Serra, has not commented. But he has adopted greener policies while governor of the State of São Paulo. If the electoral wind does not go in the direction of President Lula’s candidate, he might well have bet his political assets on a damned dam.

Sustainability cannot be a solitary quest of a few heroic companies. It has to be a collective action within and across the major supply chains of the economy. Yet, larger corporations have a leading role to get any real progress in greening the supply chain.I was once speaking about corporate and public corruption, illegal business practices, such as deforestation and forced labor, and sustainability to a very select audience. The point was that firms that indulge in such practices may be profitable for some time, but will eventually fail and fall. The broader issue was corporate risk management and sustainability. The focus was climate change risk. The specific reference was to business practices in Brazil. The audience, a global advisory board of CEO’s of large corporations that belonged to the supply chain of a firm that has an important stake in the Brazilian market.

I argued that climate change risk was a real and present danger that required prompt action of major corporations. They should start leading their supply chains towards a low-carbon model. I wanted to convey the idea that a firm’s carbon footprint was inextricably linked to its supply chain’s footprint. “A dirty link in the chain ends up by making the whole chain dirty.”

I gave several real-life examples related to sustainability and corporate social responsibility. Amazon deforestation was linked to soy and beef exports, hence deforestation was part of these industries’ carbon footprints. Cattle ranching, soybean, sugar cane plantations, and charcoal production were tainted by the use of forced labor. I showed how the supply chains for these activities housed both illegal and legal activities. How, for instance, pig-iron mills bought legal iron-ore from a top mining company, illegal charcoal from loggers in the Amazon, or the Brazilian savannah, and legally sold their product to top steel mills. The mining and steel companies were ranked among the best, most competitive Brazilian firms with a sizable share of their global markets. Or, how sugar cane cultivated and harvested with the use of forced labor would lead to two of the country’s major export commodities: sugar and ethanol.

When I finished talking, one of the CEO’s was outraged, and asked me on a high pitch: “Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this?” As he looked around the round table to his peers, he saw they were perplexed by his reaction. He, then, added: “I agree with everything he has said, I agree with everything he is proposing. But why he’s chosen to say it so bluntly?”

I know what he wanted to hear. An unspecific, general, motivational defense of sustainability, without naming names, or blaming the leading corporations for the blunders across their supply chains. Except for a few foreigners that knew very little about Brazil, all the others were acquainted with this reality. As this CEO had been at the top of a supply chain with all the problems I mentioned, he blamed me for a useless blame game.

I’m used to this sort of reaction from some audiences, when I speak too candidly about corporate misbehavior. They get even angrier when I say that large globalized firms that buy illegal products, that won’t take action to clean up their supply chains are even more responsible than the small sheep in the herd. It is a simple argument. When one looks into, let’s say, the supply chain for the Brazilian steel industry, what one see is a very heterogeneous mix of practices, uniting giant corporations and small and medium low quality ones. Now who is to blame? The smaller and weaker parts of the chain, or the larger and powerful ones? The former can’t survive without the complacency of the latter. Large corporations can make do without small and mid-sized low-quality suppliers, especially those who resort to illegal practices. The larger have the power to discipline the smaller.

There is no sustainable firm, if its supply chain is not entirely sustainable. An unsustainable supply chain is ultimately the responsibility of the larger companies in it, both upstream and downstream.

Usually Brazilian law enforcers and regulators tend to go after the smaller fish, rather than the big ones. This has proven useless again and again. Getting the few larger ones to behave and to lead their suppliers and buyers into good behavior will do the trick. Shut down the smaller companies, and others will emerge to replace them.

It was tough talking and enforcement through market leadership that made possible the “pact against slave labor” in Brazil. ILO and the Brazilian Labor Ministry cooperated to identify cases of forced labor in the Brazilian economy. Investigative reporting by the NGO Brazil Reporters brought further evidence to a dirty list of proven cases of “slave labor”. The business-oriented NGO Ethos Institute took care of mobilizing and coordinating corporate support to an “anti-slave labor pact”. A company would commit not to buy from those in the dirty list by signing the pact. A significant number of large corporations operating in Brazil signed it.

The pact has not eradicated slave labor yet, but it has contributed to reduce its scale in the economy. Forced labor is gradually being eliminated from the larger and more value-added supply chains.

It was tough talking that enabled Greenpeace to bring large consumers of Brazilian soybean, like McDonald’s, to discuss Amazon deforestation. After Greenpeace named the names and showed the data, McDonald’s called the large traders and told them to stop buying soy from illegally cleared land.

The so-called “soy moratorium” has contributed to significantly reduce the role of soy export production in land-grabbing and land clearing in the Amazon.

It was though talking that has also helped Greenpeace to convince large supermarket chains like Walmart, Carrefour and Pão de Açúcar to tell beef wholesalers they would not buy meat from their Amazon operations. Cattle-ranching and beef wholesaling were the leading factors of Amazon deforestation.

The “beef moratorium” has not yet yielded the same results the “soy moratorium” has achieved, but it has made visible progress. Other large players on the beef and leather supply chains felt compelled to join the agreement.

Corporations adhere to these “pacts” for sustainability because of their values, or due to market pressures from large scale buyers and consumers’ manifest preferences? I’d say market pressures and consumer preferences have, at the very least, a decisive role in strengthening and enforcing corporate values.

These are extreme examples, but they help to make it very clear that sustainability is about market leadership. Leadership may require the help of regulatory inducements and constraints or some other form of pressure to emerge, though. They also help us to understand that there can’t be sustainable companies operating within unsustainable supply chains. An internal sustainable logistics and an indoors low-carbon operation by themselves do not make a firm sustainable or low-carbon, if its supply chain continues to be a high-carbon one. A “no questions asked” policy is antithetical to a sustainability policy. Sustainability has to be obtained throughout the product’s life cycle, from the very beginning of the supply chains leading to the final product, and up to its end use or consumption, waste and disposal.

Particularly now, in the climate change era, sustainability cannot be a solitary quest of heroic few companies imbued with high values. It has to be a collective action within and across the major supply chains of the economy.

Put together an extreme natural event, a vulnerable population and a reckless government and a social catastrophe is very likely to obtain. The cost: a large preventable death toll.

“Carelessness could be the biggest enemy. In the past, even if the waves were not so big, there has been great damage with 2-metre high tsunami,” prime minister Yukio Hatoyama said about the alert after the earthquake in Chile.

The government ordered 245,000 households along Japan’s Pacific coast to evacuate. Afterwards the risk may have seemed overstated. One should consider, however, that Chile’s was the sixth most powerful earthquake ever registered on a seismographer. Fortunately, only waves of up to 30 cm (12 inches) hit Japan’s northern Pacific coast and the town of Nemuro, 970 km northeast of  Tokyo, said Reuters.

Hatoyama is right. There are no natural catastrophes. Catastrophes are always human-made. They are social, not physical, phenomena. A catastrophe happens when a high-intensity or extreme natural event meets a vulnerable population, with a weak, unprepared or reckless government.

Natural events are largely unpredictable, uncontrollable and large-scale. It is not possible to avoid them. That’s why adaptation and preparedness are so important to reduce the death toll and widespread public and private property damage. Prevention requires urban and land-use planning, buildings adapted to the most frequent events, early-warning systems, preparedness measures, well trained, equipped and alert disaster rescue teams.

It is far better to apologize for overrating the risk of tsunamis, as the Hawaiian and Japanese authorities have done, than accounting for the deaths due to unpreparedness. On both countries, the memory of other actual extreme events justifies every precautionary measure. And we are talking about people of developed countries.

Poor populations are the most vulnerable to extreme natural hazards: they’re largely unassisted, there are no nearby disaster rescue resources. Such resources are generally deployed near the wealthier parts of the cities. Their homes are inadequate and highly vulnerable. They often live in high concentrations of people per square foot, increasing the social scale of harm. It is a tragic recipe for catastrophe all too common in large regions of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Add any strong natural ingredient to this recipe and human tragedy becomes a certainty: tropical storms, flooding, land and mudslides, earthquakes, tornados, hurricanes, tsunamis will provoke a massive number of deaths.

A decade ago, an analysis of ‘natural disasters’ in Latin America already alerted that the majority countries in the region would rather adopt a policy of reconstruction and post-disaster international assistance, than a strategy of disaster prevention.

Rather than taking a proactive approach towards risk management focused on risk reduction and preparedness, the region continues to rely upon costly reconstruction processes and post-disaster international assistance. This reactive stance is not only costly in terms of lives and destroyed assets, but also appears largely unsustainable as worldwide international assistance decreases and natural disaster proneness increases everywhere. This is why the improvement of risk management appears essential to guarantee the protection and future progress of economic and social development in the region.

A study recently published by the Wilson Center shows that poverty is a central component of vulnerability to natural hazards.

The capacity to survive and recover from the effects of a natural disaster is the result of two factors: the physical magnitude of the disaster in a given area, and the socioeconomic conditions of individuals or social groups in that area. Vulnerability is differentiated by social groups in almost all natural disasters. Altogether, it is estimated that 90% of victims and 75% of all economic damages accrue to developing countries.

In Central America and a large part of South America, social conditions significantly increase the risk of catastrophes due to exposure to frequent extreme natural events. In richer countries like Brazil, social inequalities coupled with bad governance have the same effect: vulnerable populations are as exposed and fragile to natural hazards as the dispossessed from the poorer countries of the region.

In Central America, the relationship between socio-economic conditions and the impact of natural disasters can generally be expressed as follows: economic constraints force the poor to live in precarious homes, made of flimsy, nondurable materials, on the least-valued plots of land. The poor build their shacks on steep hillsides; on floodplains; in fragile ecosystems and watersheds; and on contaminated land, right-of-ways, and other inappropriate areas. Even government housing and urban-development policies tend to overlook environmental constraints and lack adequate information for land-use planning. Inappropriate location invites serious social and environmental problems, which are aggravated by deforestation as well as by inadequate management of rainwater and wastes. During disasters, inadequate services and infrastructure further complicate survival efforts.

An impact analysis of 1998 hurricane Mitch shows that in Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala, the most badly hit municipalities had the higher indices of poverty. In Honduras, the illiterate population had a relative risk of being affected my Mitch about 80 times greater than the population from the highest educational levels. Huge differences were also found between households headed by illiterate persons and those headed by persons with at least elementary education.

Haiti is just like that. Even worse. Look at Haiti’s death toll: more than 200,000. Chile is nothing like that. Its death toll will probably end below 2,00o people, in spite of having been hit by a much stronger earthquake and a larger tsunami. Chile has trained rescue teams that have already proved effective during other disasters of large dimensions. Concepción, the city that was directly hit by the earthquake and the tsunami this weekend, has faced other extreme events. In 1960, a 9.5 quake on the Richter scale, the largest ever registered by instruments, hit its southern coastal area.

After decades of continued growth, Chile has a US$ 14,000 per capita income.  The difference of the 10% highest earnings to the 10% lowest  has dropped by 21% between 1990 and 2006. The proportion of poor people in the population has dropped 64%, and the proportion of  people in extreme poverty, 75%, over the same period.

Chile’s social problems are not solved. There is still a lot to do. But the vulnerability of its population has been considerably reduced. This helps to explain to a large extent why the death toll is smaller today than it was when events of a lesser strength have hit the country in the past. Preparedness helps to explain another important part of the reduction of human losses.

Extreme climatic events will increase in frequency or intensity, or both over the next years and decades. Countries like Brazil, fortunate not to have severe earthquakes, are particularly vulnerable to climate change. In its urban centers and peripheries there are large numbers of people exposed to very high risks. The country spends billions of dollars every year on recovery and only a few million on prevention. Its housing policies do not consider environmental and natural risks and vulnerabilities. Location studies are inept. Application criteria lack transparency, and house distribution does not give priority to the people under higher environmental and climatic risk. A perfect recipe for disaster.

The mistake about the Himalayan glaciers meltdown deserves a stronger statement by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – IPCC. The case is not central do the core evidence on climate change, but it is not a minor issue either.

Let’s begin with the facts. Several geologists contested the inclusion in the latest report of the IPCC of a highly contentious claim about the speed at which Himalayan glaciers are melting. The mention on a paragraph of the report was based not on peer-reviewed research, but on a quote of a New Scientist story in a document issued by the NGO World Wildlife Foundation, WWF – “An Overview of Glaciers, Glacier Retreat, and Subsequent Impacts in Nepal, India and China”:

The New Scientist magazine carried the article “Flooded Out – Retreating glaciers spell disaster for valley communities” in their 5 June 1999 issue. It quoted Professor Syed Hasnain, then Chairman of the International Commission for Snow and Ice’s (ICSI) Working Group on Himalayan Glaciology, who said most of the glaciers in the Himalayan region “will vanish within 40 years as a result of global warming”. The article also predicted that freshwater flow in rivers across South Asia will “eventually diminish, resulting in widespread water shortages”.

The use of “grey information”, that is, not peer-reviewed, was a mistake in itself, attributable to the lead author or authors of the section on glaciers to be later used in the report. Besides, the text should have been checked by a referee prior to its final acceptance.

The Indian government published a study – Himalayan Glaciers: A State-of-Art Review of Glacial Studies, Glacial Retreat and Climate Change, by geologist V. K. Rayna, dismissing the claims of such a rapid meltdown of the glaciers. The Guardian’s Adam Vaughn says that IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri dismissed the report as not peer-reviewed and added:

“With the greatest of respect this guy retired years ago and I find it totally baffling that he comes out and throws out everything that has been established years ago.”

Jonathan Leake and Chris Hastings of The Sunday Times report that Graham Cogley, a geographer from Trent University in Ontario, Canada, traced the IPCC claim back to the New Scientist. Cogley contacted Fred Pearce, the author of the original NS story, who re-interviewed Hasnain. The scientist confirmed that his 1999 comments had been “speculative”. Pearce published the update in the New Scientist.

According to the Times, Cogley said:

“The reality, that the glaciers are wasting away, is bad enough. But they are not wasting away at the rate suggested by this speculative remark and the IPCC report. The problem is that nobody who studied this material bothered chasing the trail back to the original point when the claim first arose. It is ultimately a trail that leads back to a magazine article and that is not the sort of thing you want to end up in an IPCC report.”

The Times story also got the reaction of Professor Murari Lal, who oversaw the chapter on glaciers in the IPCC report. He told the reporters he would only recommend that the claim about glaciers be dropped:

“If Hasnain says officially that he never asserted this, or that it is a wrong presumption, than I will recommend that the assertion about Himalayan glaciers be removed from future IPCC assessments.”

The New Scientist quotes Murari Lal saying he “outright rejected” the notion that the IPCC was off the mark on Himalayan glaciers. “The IPCC authors did exactly what was expected from them,” he said to NS’s Fred Pearce. He also told Pearce that “we relied rather heavily on grey [not peer-reviewed] literature, including the WWF report.” His conclusion is that “the error, if any, lies with Dr Hasnain’s assertion and not with the IPCC authors.”

That’s a strange notion of responsibility by a scientist playing the role of lead author for a section of the world’s most important official scientific statement about climate change. Any good journalist would tell him, that “the error of one’s source is one’s error too”, since one has the obligation to verify the validity of one’s sources. Not to mention the quality of one’s choices of sources.

Hasnain, interviewed by the Times of India, said:

“I am unnecessarily being dragged into the controversy. The IPCC did not even consult me or ask me for my research papers for inclusion in the fourth assessment report”.

Hasnain is now a Fellow with The Energy and Resources Institute, TERI. TERI’s Executive-director is Rajendra Pachauri. TERI displays on its site news about Hasnain’s opinion on glaciers meltdown here and here, for instance.

The IPCC has finally issued a bland, bureaucratic, statement admitting the error:

It has, however, recently come to our attention that a paragraph in the 938-page Working Group II contribution to the underlying assessment refers to poorly substantiated estimates of rate of recession and date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers. In drafting the paragraph in question, the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly.

The Chair, Vice-Chairs, and Co-chairs of the IPCC regret the poor application of well-established IPCC procedures in this instance. This episode demonstrates that the quality of the assessment depends on absolute adherence to the IPCC standards, including thorough review of “the quality and validity of each source before incorporating results from the source into an IPCC Report”. We reaffirm our strong commitment to ensuring this level of performance.

There are three orders of concern IPCC scientists should have about this role affair. The first one is the circumstance under which the error has been exposed.The second one is that the IPCC is part of a delicate architecture of climate change politics already in crisis. This architecture depends critically on its credibility and accountability. Finally, climate science has to be the foundation of both a global climate accord and global climate change governance.

The circumstance is very negative. The CRU hack incident was hardly over. The “deniers” campaign against what they call “warmism” is hotter than ever. The inclusion of the mistaken paragraph on the IPCC report revealing that the proper validity checks have failed is obvious fodder for further attacks on the soundness of climate science and the reliability of the IPCC itself. The circumstances are pretty bad for the IPCC side, and warrants a far stronger reaction that the bland statement issued by the Chair.

It is clear that the lead author was reckless. It is also clear that the document he was responsible for was not reviewed adequately by qualified referees. It is also clear that the IPCC resisted looking more carefully at the issue when faced with initial criticism. Those directly responsible for these blunders should be formally impeded to participate in the making of AR5.

The credibility issue is a major one. The global climate accord is crumbling due to a serious confidence crisis among the Parties to the Climate Convention. Science should be the stalwart of the system. It has to contribute to increase confidence in the system, not to add to confusion and discredit.

Climate science has to be the guideline of collective decisions, and that role forces it to be extremely rigorous with itself.

I was far more comfortable with the answer I got from Richard Betts, Met Office’s head of climate change, on the CRU Hack incident. He told me in Copenhagen that they will rebuilt CRU’s data bank from the scratch on a transparent and verifiable way, to eliminate any objection to the data’s validity. He also said these procedures are to make science clearer and still more credible, despite their total confidence on the integrity of scientific procedures and quality of its findings. That’s how issues of credibility should be dealt with. I hope they’re doing it.

The role system of global climate governance will require sound science and checks and balances to ensure accountability and confidence-building. Science should be teaching how to build credible procedures for monitoring, verifying and reporting, beginning with its own production.

These are major political and intellectual considerations deserving a proper response from the IPCC and the global climate science community.

One should not also neglect the fact that the Himalayan meltdown is a major geopolitical concern. Himalayan glacial waters are a crucial source for millions in the region. It is also, a matter of regional water security and political stability.

Although not a decisive issue regarding the validity of the core evidence on climate change in the IPCC assessment, it is a major climatic and environmental issue in itself.

If history will repeat itself again in Haiti, the country runs the risk of plunging into deep social regression. It is on the verge of a dreadful state of nature. A state where people are led by instinct, fed by pain, anger, despair, and distrust.

History is not fate, or destiny. It is the result of social forces interacting with natural factors. Ramsey Clark alerts that “the history of Haiti will break your heart.” Brazilians use to sing Caetano Veloso’s 1980‘s song Haiti, where he asks: “think about Haiti, pray for Haiti.”

Haiti’s history has been an intercourse between human predators and brutal natural forces. Exploitation, isolation, occupation, the imposition of heavy reparations, hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis have devastated the country’s right to a civilized future since the beginning of colonial rule.

Its native population was decimated in less than three decades after Columbus set foot on Hispaniola Island. The natives were replaced by African slaves. Haiti paid a double and unbearable price for its Independence War. As Clark wrote:

Haiti lay in ruins, nearly half its population lost. The African slaves of Haiti had defeated the army of Napoleon Bonaparte. The 12-year war for liberation had destroyed most of the irrigation systems and machinery that, with slave labor, had created France’s richest colony and were the foundation of the island’s economy.

After Independence, in 1804, came isolation. The economies of the Americas were built on slavery. European nations were colonial powers. No nation wanted to legitimate an order born of slave revolt for freedom, or colonial rebellion. The United States would only recognize the independent republic after Civil War rid the country of its slave system, in 1862. Slavery was only abolished in Brazil in 1888, 66 years after its independence from Portugal.

The wealthier landowners who had not left Haiti after heavy losses from the destruction of coffee, cocoa, cotton and tobacco plantations, or were not killed during the Independence War, fled the island before the French surrender, or with the French troops.

Fear of the virus of black insurrection turned the “Pearl of the Caribbean” into the pariah of the Americas. Isolation was a greater price to pay for rebellion than lives lost and a devastated economy. It gave the poor island no means for recovery. Its connections with world markets were severed. The US would only allow limited trade before official recognition. Haiti desperately needed economic integration with the rest of the world. Its only source of revenue were tradable commodities (sugar, cotton, coffee, cocoa, tobacco). It lacked capital, and would not attract investors. Access to the French market would only be opened to Haiti after the country agreed to pay a heavy – and mostly illegitimate – indemnity for seized land.

After isolation, came occupation. The US occupied Haiti for 19 years, from 1915 to 1934. It left the country poorer than when the marines took over the Island.

Unemployed Haitians,looking for jobs, had moved to the Dominican Republic during occupation. The Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo presided over a genocidal racist campaign against black Haitians. As many as 40,000 were killed.

After foreign abuse, came brutal domestic oppression. The two Duvaliers, Papa Doc and Baby Doc, and their Tonton Macoutes established a murderous reign of terror, exploitation and corruption. It lasted for 30 years, most of the time with the formal or informal support of Western Nations, the US in particular.

As late as 2003 the US, the European Union and multilateral banks were withholding $500 million in aid and loans because, they said, Aristide’s government failed to reach a compromise with opposition parties which boycotted the elections. Again the threat of sanctions and isolation was used against the poor Haitians on political grounds.

What about natural forces? Haiti is geographically a disaster prone location. When natural risk is evaluated against the social frailties of the Island, it becomes a tragedy prone country.

Hurricanes were unknown to Europeans venturing in the Caribbean seas for the first time. Christopher Columbus met his first near Hispaniola in 1495 and was startled by its violence. During colonial times tropical storms and hurricanes devastated plantations throughout the Caribbean. The heavier losses were incurred by the more valued and demanding plantations of coffee, cotton, cocoa and tobacco. Sugar cane plantations were also destroyed, but their shorter cultivation cycle allowed landowners to resume production sooner, at lower investment cost. This explains to a considerable extent the trend towards monoculture. It also led many wealthier plantation owners to migrate with the cash results of their production. Hence the progressive reduction on the size of landed properties and the impoverishment of the landed elite. An impoverished elite, eager to extract the most from its land on the shorter span of time possible, meant more exploitation of slave labor, greater violence and absence of any concern for the welfare of slaves and the non-elite. Growing poverty and dispossession resulted from the climatic hardships of the plantation economy.

Extensive plantation and the search for safer locations led to deforestation. Hispaniola had an immense wealth of biodiversity when it was discovered. All this wealth was lost with almost total deforestation. Deforestation increased the island vulnerability do extreme climate.

In short, since colonial times Haitians were victims of a merciless cycle of misery caused by the interplay of human violence, environmental degradation and severe natural phenomena.

Deforestation, lack of adequate emergency service and poor infrastructure also help to explain the recent history of extreme natural events making human tragedy to be reenacted time and again in Haiti.

In 1935, a storm killed more than 2000 people. In 1946, an 8.1 magnitude earthquake was registered in Hispaniola. Although centered in the Dominican Republic it also affected Haiti extensively. In 1954, hurricane Hazel killed people, destroyed 40 per cent of the coffee trees and 50 per cent of the cacao crop. In 1963 hurricane Flora killed 8000 people. In 1994, hurricane Gordon wiped out 80% of the crops of the country. In 2004 tropical storm Jeanne provoked extensive flooding and landslides, killing 2,500 people and displacing thousands more. In 2008 Haiti was hit by four different hurricanes – Fay, Gustav, Hanna and Ike – in the space of 30 days: 800 people died, 60 per cent of the country’s agriculture were devastated, and entire cities became desolate and uninhabitable.

“Today, we are all Haitians”, New York Times columnist Nicolas Kristof (@nickkristof ) twitted from New York City, CNN anchor Kristie Lu Stout (@klustout) retwitted from Hong Kong, and O Globo columnist Míriam Leitão (@MiriamLeitaoCom), re-retwitted from Rio de Janeiro. It remains to be seen for how long we’ll keep Haiti on our hearts and minds.

I fear we will forget the Haitian tragedy in a few months. The country will fail to get aid on the amount required to rebuilt its cities appropriately. People will not get safer and better homes. Infrastructure will not be recovered and improved. Emergency service will not be provided. Risk areas will continue to be occupied and unattended.

The best case scenario, alas an unlikely one, would be an unprecedented success story of world solidarity to Haitians. Haiti wouldn’t be forgotten. The world would give back to its people through unconditional and unprejudiced aid part of the wealth it transferred to richer nations. The Haitian children, half of its population, would get good, unprejudiced education. Quality education would enable young Haitians to take the best of its cultural tradition, acquire the knowledge to become good active citizens and get qualified to lead the country to a civilized life sometime in the 21^st century.

Let me finish with Ramsey Clark’s whole phrase on Haiti’s history.

The history of Haiti will break your heart. Knowing it, the weak will despair, but the caring will strive to break the chains of tragedy.

My computer screen showed climate militants marching and facing police blockades over the streets of Copenhagen and in the neighborhood of Bella Center. On the TV screens spread all over the crowded Media Center journalists could watch a plenary session of COP15, where government delegates discussed the most pressing global threat of the 21^st Century.

I pushed my chair back and looked at the numerous long tables, each seating around 40 journalists of all parts of the world, of all possible kinds of media. One glimpse revealed it all: government delegates debating their differences, the NGOs marching, peacefully trying to make their way into the negotiations, and the media watching, reporting, commenting.

And, yes, tweeting. About 7 out of 10 computers had Twitter opened on a window. With the right hashtag one could follow what journalists were reporting on Twitter in their languages. Several would tweet in their native languages and in English or French.

This was only one of several dramatic days. While in the plenary sessions delegates defended principled points, in the negotiation rooms intense, tense, and extensive negotiations were in progress. Or, sometimes, in regress. Militants marched protesting for access to the Conference and demanding that negotiators take meaningful action to respond to climate challenges.

Journalists jumped from one press conference to another; looked for exclusive info or insight talking to delegates.

This momentary view of the three international critical players of current climate politics simultaneously in action, like in a movie, made me start taking notes in a frenzy. They were gathered around the same agenda, but to play very distinct and relevant roles: governments, NGOs and the Press. They address climate issues from very different angles. Differences are central not only among these three sets of players, but also within each one. Individuals in each think in different languages. Groupings within and among them reflect diverse social, economic and political backgrounds. They display widely varied degrees of concern, knowledge and engagement regarding climate change.

To a professional political analyst and a journalist this was a very rich situation, a brain-storming event.

Arriving early in the morning every day at the Bella Center, I would immediately start to tweet many ideas about what was happening. Over the twelve days I was there, I posted several pieces to my blogs Ecopolitica and Ecopolity. I also made daily commentaries for the Brazilian radio network CBN. And I took notes all the time, to later help me think and write about the Copenhagen meeting, its aftermath and what’s to be done.

Back home, after some rest, I started reading my notes and browsing some books in order to design an analytical framework to organize my observations. But those intense 12 days of COP15 kept bringing back fragments of memory, snapshots of meaningful moments.

There was a sharp and annoying contrast between the aloofness of my academic readings and the liveliness of these fragments. The first book I picked was about the new transnational activism. For more than 40 pages all I could read was an endless conceptual argument. Academic minutiae seemed to obliterate a sense of relevance. I can’t see how it really matters whether an NGO such as Greenpeace should be called an NGO or something else; whether it is an international, transnational or global organization.

Form has replaced meaning. Formality is mistaken by precision. To be more formal doesn’t mean to be more accurate.

I am too fond of books to abandon reading them, though. I browsed, selected, dropped the useless, and kept reading what seemed relevant to me.

Like Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. Browsing it, I stopped at the paragraph below, on chapter 7, “Cosmopolitan Contamination: Global Villages”.

People who complain about the homogeneity produced by globalization often fail to notice that globalization is, equally, a threat to homogeneity. (…) (H)omogeneity, though, is the local kind. (…) In the era of globalization – in Asante as in New Jersey – people make pockets of homogeneity. (…) And whatever loss of difference there has been, they are constantly inventing new forms of difference: new hairstyles, new slang, even, from times to times, new religions. No one could say that the world’s villages are  – or are about to become – anything like the same.

To anyone who spent about 16 hours a day in the Bella Center, for 12 days, as an “embedded journalist”, covering every aspect of the Climate Summit and interacting with all the different tribes that crowded the conference site, Appiah’s contention is crystal clear and couldn’t be more accurate.

It describes and explains the contradictions of globalization, the encounters, exchanges and diversity that it entails. The Bella Center had become a “global site” gathering very different tribes, some with antagonistic interests, to deal with a major global issue.

We could see an NGO militant on a crash-demonstration in the passageways of Bella Center, marching over the streets of Copenhagen, debating technical issues with delegates and lobbyists, or passing the results of intelligence work to journalists.

This role differentiation develops while these organizations grow, become stronger, wealthier, and more influential. They diversify their political roles as they get more expertise, more organizational capabilities and enlist people with different skills, aptitudes and backgrounds. Through this process, these new actors of global politics are creating a global civil society even before the first pieces of what will become a system for global governance are put in place. Formal international politics, having governments as the main actors, is far behind, particularly as far as global climate politics is concerned. And we saw plenty of evidence supporting this hypothesis there.

Although the different tribes interacting at the Bella Center theater had the same agenda, it was their different approaches to this common agenda that mattered most. Differences were paramount. They allowed critical actors to play very different roles: as militants, negotiators, reporters, analysts, commentators, doing intelligence or sharing information. Differences were a source of diversity as well as a fuel to contentious politics. Diverse actors expressed distinctive perceptions of climate change as a threat, an opportunity, a hindrance or a hoax.

At the end, diverging interests were stronger than commonalities and the deal was watered down. This end to the summit has by no means diminished its historic dimension. Formal politics has stayed behind, but made a few steps forward. Civil society got out of there stronger and more enlightened about what to do next.

My own perception is that interests, conflicts, and different views became more visible and recognizable in Copenhagen. Like when the small and threatened Tuvalu confronted the giant and threatened China.

I can’t say whether other global meetings on other issues have gained the same political magnitude as COP15 did. What I know is that the Copenhagen Summit was unprecedented in all counts, when compared to the other COPs: the number of NGOs, the size of national delegations, the scale of media presence and coverage, or the number of chiefs of states and governments present to the last 2 of the 12 days of the Conference. This was beyond any doubt the larger and more cosmopolitan climate meeting ever.

It was, by far, the major display of strength, technical expertise and political capability by the global environmental movement in recent history. Large and small NGOs became critical actors in the negotiations. They had expert people doing serious policy advocacy. They fiercely confronted lobbyists and greenwashers. They aptly transmitted to the media technical information and intelligence on what was being negotiated within closed doors.

As far as climate meetings go it was the first time ever that the components of a future cosmopolity were assembled in full. What we’ve seen in Copenhagen was the first full scale emergence of a cosmopolitics that will very likely become a dominant feature of 21^st Century global life.

Cosmopolitanism was clearly visible as the main element of climate politics at the Bella Center meeting. One could see Timothy Brennan’s “polychromatic culture” live at the atrium, passageways and rooms of the Center. Brennan is right when he says this multiverse culture is “a new singularity born out of a blending and merging of multiple local constituents.” The quote is from the essay “Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism”, published in Daniele Archibugi (editor) – Debating Cosmopolitics.

And it was possible to discern the seeds of cosmopolitanism as global governance in the dramatic exchange of visions, demands, interests and principles. The strength of global civil society, in situ and all over the world directly connected with their counterparts in Copenhagen, is clearly building momentum for the emergence of this sort of cosmopolitanism.

The unprecedented presence of world media and the width of media coverage, will certainly help to broaden the scope of cosmopolitan politics.

Finally, the unprecedented attendance of more than 100 heads of states and governments, among them the leaders of the major mature and emerging powers has contributed to give this first experiment of climate cosmopolitics strong political significance.

The citizenship of this future system of global governance is emerging before any new element of effective global governance is in place. Building such a governance regime will be a daunting endeavor. Its complexity should not be underestimated. It is not about building a world state, or a global government. There is too much risk for freedom and human rights in such a notion. It is about global governance without global government. It requires a considerable amount of institutional innovation and experimentation.

Ben Block from the World Watch Institute, pointed correctly that despite disappointment, the Climate Summit marks a high point for the activist movement. This part of global civil society has swelled in strength and recognition in recent years.

The two-week U.N. conference may have ended in disappointment for most climate activists, who travelled from nearly every continent, but the gathering marked a historic high point for a movement that has swelled in strength and recognition in recent years.

An estimated 45,000 people attended the climate negotiations. This included greater participation from government delegations, business groups, and academics, in addition to larger turnout from campaigners. The “youth” delegation, representatives of the below-30 age group, increased its presence at forums that were once attended only by bureaucrats and scientists. Youth organizers said that their volunteers registered some 1,000 attendants, twice the participation compared to a year ago.

The activist crowds were relentless: they raised their voices during negotiation sessions, press briefings, and lunch breaks; they scattered in the corners of conference rooms and gathered in mobs to block passageways; and they screamed loudly for adaptation aid, among other demands. Activists also made subtle suggestions about the ineffectiveness of carbon offsets, for example by using tricks to show airplanes vanishing magically in the same way that carbon offsets make emissions “disappear,” they said.

Negotiation leaders acknowledged that the demonstrations captured their attention.

This history in the making gives full support and deep meaning to Jonathan Watts’s opinion that

Copenhagen will shape our lives for years to come.

Sergio Abranches

Everything seemed to add to the sentiment of an impeding failure. An off-agenda meeting in Singapore with Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen have apparently staged a fast-track exit solution to save face: a brief political memorandum of understanding loosely mentioning future commitments.

Strong negative reaction from global and domestic civil society, scientific circles, helped to turn the wheel of future history. Major developed and emerging countries, one by one, either reasserted their commitments – case of the EU and Japan – or shifted from a noncommittal attitude to one of active cooperation.

Among the developed countries the most important shift came from the US. The announcement by the White House that president Obama will go to the beginning of the Copenhagen summit, with numbers to lay down on the negotiation table, was a turning point.

China followed suit also announcing a quantitative commitment that several analysts argue represent a tough challenge to the country.

A few days before, the Brazilian government had also said it would commit to a voluntary quantitative target for future emissions reduction. Subsequently the Senate approved a law of climate change that included the government’s plan.

After a decade of denial, three pivotal players, for the first time, admit making international commitments for carbon emissions reductions that are measurable and verifiable. It may turn out that instead of just a turning point we’re on the verge of a political tipping point. If these commitments become an effective, binding and accountable political agreement, Copenhagen may be a historical landmark. A decade-long deadlock will be broken, and climate diplomacy will enter into a new era.

Not everything is that bright though. The sum total of national pledges does not add up to the minimum required by science. There still remains a decoupling between the politics and the science of global climate change. Once the political deadlock is broken, however, to negotiate an upward adjustment of targets could be easier, depending on the extent of the political consensus to be reached in Copenhagen. Perhaps breaking down the targets into smaller cycles – 2010-2015; 2015-2020; 2020-2030;2030-2050 – could do the trick (oops! any skeptical reading me?).

Provided these pre-COP15 announcements are honored in Copenhagen and a strong political deal is sealed tight, we may finally be heading to a post-2012 global climate policy.

Sergio Abranches

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was the latest to move a step ahead. He said yesterday that India would be “part of the solution” to the global climate change challenge, tells  Climate Progress, after an ENNews report. On a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, Singh told his audience that “it is important for all countries to make every effort to contribute to a successful outcome at Copenhagen”. He also stated that although India was a latecomer to industrialization,

“we are determined to be part of the solution,” and “willing to work toward any solution that does not compromise the right of developing countries to develop and lift their populations out of poverty.”

President Hu Jintao had already announced that China would go to Copenhagen with a set of concrete actions to help negotiate a deal. More recently the Brazilian government has pledged to reduce by 36%-39% emissions to 2020 projected on a BAU scenario with 5% annual economic growth. White House officials said the US will propose an emissions reduction target to the climate summit, although pending Congressional approval.

Around 65 heads of governments have already said they will be in Copenhagen to help sealing the deal. Among them, UK prime minister Gordon Brown, German chancellor Angela Merkel, French president Nicolas Sarkozy, Brazilian president Lula da Silva. No news yet from President Hu Jintao, of China, or Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh. President Barack Obama has said he’d go if his presence could make a difference in closing the deal. White House officials think it is becoming likely he will finally decide to go.

The road to the Copenhagen climate summit is already very different from the route countries have taken towards each previous COP, since, at least, the Buenos Aires meeting, in 2004. All COPs have been marked by the fact that major players would arrive with a pocketful of objections to the negotiations, rather than reasonable bids. Each summit ended on a tighter deadlock.

In Bali, this tightening deadlock threatened the whole diplomatic architecture built around the Kyoto Protocol. As a last minute bailout solution negotiators decided to draft an “action plan”, a “roadmap”, so that an agreement could be reached over the next 12 months.

In Poznan, 2008, 12 months later, however, the US, a pivotal player, was changing administration. It seemed only too appropriate to wait for the Obama crew to take hold of governmental affairs, and bring to COP15 its full weight to close the deal.

Alas, president Obama invested more time than he imagined to get a health care reform from the Democratic majority on the Capitol. Only very recently he started to look after the US emissions reduction plan. Too late to get it on time.

It seemed we were moving more or less in the same direction we headed when going to Bali. But there is no room for another roadmap. However, when we look at what negotiators had on their briefcases before – objections, demands, blaming each other – and what they are packing today, it seems they’re not preparing for the same journey they’d made in 2007.

The road to Copenhagen has become as relevant for global climate politics as the final outcome. Several important steps were made for the first time: China agreeing to discuss an action plan to curb its own emissions; Brazil talking numbers, after years rejecting any hint of commitment by non-Annex I countries; the US seating to help closing the deal, rather than to veto any progress, and probably offering, also for the first time, to propose a target for emissions reduction; India, offering to cooperate and even to discuss actions.

It doesn’t seem that bad at all. Add to that the already approved EU targets, and the statement by the Japanese prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, that his government will raise emissions target from 20% to 25% below 1990 levels, and it looks like we already have a blueprint for a deal.

Sure, as the UK Secretary for Agriculture and the Environment, Hilary Benn, has said on an interview to Brazilian journalist Miriam Leitão, for the Globonews channel: “the science is clear, and time is short.” The sum total of bids will likely fall short from what science sets as the minimum necessary to increase the likelihood of a global warming scenario not too far beyond 2^oC by 2100.

But let’s look at the brighter side: we would be moving from deadlock to a preliminary deal. World leaders would have crossed a critical line, from refusing to act to pledging meaningful action, though still not sufficient to meet scientific requirements. The politics would get past the standoff; it would have acquired a new dynamics. It is easier to improve upon a deal, than to break deadlocked negotiations.

If the only feasible target for Copenhagen is to go just beyond the stalemate, although to a point not close enough to the necessary scientific goal, I’d say it is at any rate pointing towards a historical outcome.

The road to Copenhagen has become a bit brighter. The preparatory measures for the meeting already show changes that we weren’t expecting a few months ago. If a political deal based on these pledges can be closed in Copenhagen, it will not be a breakthrough but, perhaps, a fair passage to another and higher stage of the game.