Sergio Abranches

Last week, China’s National Development and Reform Commission reportedly directed seven regions to set overall emissions control targets and submit proposals for how caps should be allocated. The directive, which encompasses the cities of Beijing, Chongqing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Tianjin and the provinces of Guangdong and Hubei, aims to establish cap-and-trade pilot projects for the country’s carbon market, meant to be in place by 2015.

The Chinese government had signaled at the COP17 climate negotiations in South Africa last December that it could adopt a more ambitious emissions reduction policy by 2015 and 2020. As part of the Copenhagen Accord, it had already committed to reducing carbon emissions intensity by 40-45 percent between 2005 and 2020.

That (albeit non-binding) commitment is reflected in the nation’s 2011-2015 five-year plan, which sets a 16-17 percent reduction target for carbon intensity.

China has never committed globally to actions that were not already a part of its ongoing domestic policies. The carbon intensity targets pledged under the Copenhagen Accord were decided internally way before Prime Minister Wen Jiabao closed a deal with the United States and other countries in Copenhagen in 2009. Now, China is poised to implement a new stage of its emissions reduction policies with fixed emissions caps.

Chinese leaders are apparently more willing to sign multilateral agreements, provided they are not a constraint on domestic policies. The way to do that is to use the Chinese planning structure to their advantage. By formulating the future stages of their policies ahead of the international agenda of negotiations, especially in the environmental realm, Chinese leaders can shift from a veto position towards a cooperative one, while maintaining complete sovereignty over domestic decision-making.

China has plenty of reasons of its own to reduce pollution, resource use and greenhouse gas emissions. It needs no outside push. The impact of land, air and water pollution on public health and well-being justifies the adoption of a more ambitious environment and climate policy. The major problem is, and will continue to be, how to balance the goals of cutting pollution and boosting efficiency with economic growth.

Carbon intensity targets pose no constraints at all on growth. Emissions can still increase while intensity decreases. China is implementing the world’s most ambitious renewable energy program, with very aggressive targets. Although solar and wind power generation are growing at staggering rates, the use of fossil fuels, particularly coal, have also increased.

This means that while China’s green energy sector is becoming very significant, its grey energy sector remains an enormous one and keeps growing, though at falling rates. The difference is that in the new Chinese policy guidelines, the gray energy sector comes with a negative sign for growth, and the green energy sector comes with a positive one. Each new plan aims at further reducing the gray sector, and increasing the green one.

The caveat is, again, the scale here. Even with downward movement at each new five-year plan, the Chinese gray economy will remain huge for decades to come. Carbon emissions associated with fossil fuel use will be on the rise well into the 2020s if not the 2030s.

Emissions caps are no guarantee that emissions will decrease faster. The experience with cap and trade systems shows they require additional measures for emissions to fall significantly. The good news is that China is also investing more in efficiency and quality improvement. Increasing the efficiency of clean energy along with energy-saving technologies can shift the economy toward more efficient patterns of energy and resource use, accelerating emissions reductions.

The best of all news is that China is abandoning the policy of growth without environmental constraints that led to the vast pollution and resource scarcity problems the country now faces. Chinese plans still aim at rates of growth far above the world average, but at the same time  they are adopting progressively greater constraints on the use of resources and fossil fuels.

(Post previously posted at National Geographic’s The Great Energy Challenge Blog)

Sergio Abranches

Brazilian state-owned financial institutions will finance research and development of cellulosic ethanol, reports the Brazilian daily newspaper Valor Econômico.

The National Development Bank, BNDES  and FINEP, the science and technology finance agency, will offer about R$ 1,1 billion (US$ 600 million) this year in subsidized loans, grants in aid and equity sharing to companies to develop pilot projects of cellulosic ethanol. There are already 14 business plans under consideration by the two financial agencies.

Brazil has a highly competitive sugarcane ethanol industry, but research on second generation biofuels has lagged behind. Ethanol companies are also facing mounting problems on their supply chain with falling productivity of sugarcane plantations. Extreme climate events have led to recurring harvest losses over the last years. Aging plantations have lower and falling productivity levels. There has been very little investment on plantation renewal over the last five years. Once a net exporter, Brazil has become a large ethanol importer. In 2011, the country imported about 1.1 billion liters of ethanol, mainly from the US, and this year estimates are it will have to import 1.7 to 2.0 billion liters. As crop yields will be around 10% lower in 2012 (they’ve been falling over the last four harvests) Brazil could end up by importing as much ethanol as it exports.

Second generation biofuels will allow greater production without competing with food crops. Brazilian cellulosic ethanol would help to increase production and productivity without demanding new areas for plantation. Brazil has at least two excellent sources for cellulosic ethanol: sugar cane straw, today burnt on the fields and doing severe harm to workers’ health and the environment, and eucalyptus offshoots left on the plantations’ sites after logging. Both have high cellulose content. Cellulosic ethanol production could increase ethanol production by at least 50% using straw and bagasse from existing sugarcane crops. Other agricultural leftovers and residues could also be used productively for cellulosic ethanol production further boosting the volume generated without increasing crop area. This would reduce the need for sugarcane plantations to expand over areas dedicated to other crops, thus becoming an indirect driver for deforestation and food insecurity.

The National Development Bank has also budgeted about R$ 2 billion (US$ 1.1 billion) to finance new biochemical products from sugarcane, and gasification of sugarcane bagasse to generate biofuels and plastics.

It is a good start, although investment on the development of second generation biofuels will demand far greater sums. The Brazilian government and biofuel companies have been neglecting R&D for second generation biofuels. The country is still under the risk of losing competitiveness and leadership on the future global biofuels markets. Brazilian competitive advantages on crop-based biofuel production comes more from the greater efficiency  of sugarcane’s photosynthesis, than from ethanol companies’ technical and managerial virtues. Now, the country will have public policies, public finance, and corporate programs supporting the development of second generation biofuel technology.

Sergio Abranches

Why the Durban Platform is a political breakthrough, but a dismal outcome in the light of climate science?

The second part of the question is far easier to answer. Negotiators in Durban have agreed to review the pledges for emissions reductions in the second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol and Cancun Agreement by 2015 in the light of the fifth assessment report on the state of science, to be released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change from September 2013. However, as the IPCC said on a press statement about COP17, “in its fourth assessment report published in 2007, the IPCC showed that a temperature increase of 2 degrees Celsius could have a damaging effect on water supplies, biodiversity, food supplies, coastal flooding and storms and health.”

Additionally, the IPCC also states that:

“The fourth assessment report shows that emissions of the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming must fall by 2050 by 50-85% globally compared to the emissions of the year 2000, and that global emissions must peak well before the year 2020, with a substantial decline after that, in order to limit the growth in global average temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.”

From the standpoint of science Durban has decided on too little too late.

In the political realm, though, COP17 was a watershed. First of all, it closes a whole chapter of negotiations on commitment periods under the Kyoto Protocol. There will be only a second one, with fewer ratifiers than the first. COP18 will still have to decide whether it will end by 2017 or 2020. There has been no consensus on the end date, and the alternatives ended up within brackets. But the main point has been resolved: it will be replaced by a new “protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force under the Convention applicable to all Parties”, no later than 2020. That’s the core decision contained in the Durban Platform.

The above expression is a political breakthrough, one that has been progressively taking shape since COP15, in Copenhagen. There, for the first time ever, the United States and the BASIC countries (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) have agreed to offer quantified pledges for emission reductions under the United Nations Climate Convention (UNFCCC). They were voluntary, not legally binding, but they have been formally registered with UNFCCC”s Executive Secretariat. It was a major first step and, at the same time, a frustrating decision.

Much more was expected from the leaders of both developed, and emerging world powers. Besides, the leaders left abruptly, creating an authority gap, between the political summit and the official Conference of the Parties. A weak COP presidency and the resulting authority gap led the plenary to only “take note” of what the leaders had agreed. The Copenhagen Accord was noted as a political decision, but did not become an “official” agreement under the track of the Convention.

The second step towards the breakthrough was made in Cancun. The pledges under the Copenhagen Accord were adopted by the Cancun Agreement, that has also made official several other decisions made in Copenhagen, as well as some that were left to be finalized by COP16, in Mexico. In Cancun, the voluntary commitments became official ones, under the umbrella of the Climate Convention.

In Durban, negotiators from the United States, the BASIC group, and the European Union underlined the official nature of the Cancun Agreement, as a preparation of the groundwork for the Platform to launch the process leading to the new universal agreement with legal force applicable to all parties to the Climate Convention. In a nutshell, it was acknowledged by all relevant parties that these commitments are legal, although not binding. The difference: the Kyoto Protocol, besides being a legal instrument, explicitly states that the targets for the countries (“industrialized countries”) listed on its Annex I are mandatory. The Cancun Agreement is part and parcel of the Climate Convention, therefore it has legal status, but the commitments registered by the parties are voluntary, not mandatory.

Finally, the Durban Platform takes the decisive step: it commits all major emitters outside the Kyoto Protocol to the negotiation of a new agreement with legal force, under which all commitments will have the same legal treatment, although they could be quantitatively differentiated on the basis of each party’s capacities.

This is not an easy decision to make. Even before it is formally adopted it is likely to cause the countries to start planning domestic actions to enable them to meet the targets yet to be defined. It is unrealistic to imagine, as some environmentalists do, that a “top down approach”, by which a decision under the Climate Convention would bind countries to take actions, would ever work.

Even the Kyoto Protocol praised for its “legally binding” status has no enforcement mechanism. What enforcement mechanism could lead Canada to meet its targets for the first period of commitment next year? None at all. Even with UN officials stating that although outside the Protocol it still has the obligation, Canada will likely fail to meet its Kyoto target, and there will hardly be any consequence to its noncompliance.

Politics hardly moves ahead of the facts. It is not a proactive process. It is a responsive one. Politics responds to active interests in economy and society. It seldom reflects even the “inactive majority” or the majority of “public opinion”. Political decisions respond to “active interest groups”, to economic constraints and inducements, and to the domestic correlation of power. Countries that show greater ambition of emissions reductions also have greater active political support from domestic economic and social forces to policies aiming at coping with climate change. Their domestic policies are usually more ambitious than their multilateral commitments.

If one looks at China’s domestic policies to reduce emissions and other forms of pollution, one will easily see that they are far ahead of what Chinese lead negotiators are willing to commit to at the Climate Convention.

Politics, in this sense, consolidates what countries are ripe to commit to at the multilateral level. The approach that really counts, and leads to progress in the negotiations under the Climate Convention is the bottom up one.

What is meaningful and relevant about the Durban process is that over the last three years major developed and emerging countries have become readier to admit to the possibility of a single climate change regime encompassing them all. The US, China, India, and Brazil said that much several times during COP17, and signed into it at the end. This outcome was not guaranteed at the outset of the climate talks. It was the result of intense negotiation and consultation. Negotiators have likely had to obtain a specific mandate from their leaders, in mid-game, to go as far as they’ve gone.

What will happen next will depend on what happens inside each of these countries. The focus of pressure should be domestic politics, rather than diplomatic undertakings. Not that the COP process doesn’t matter. It does, very much. But its main function is not to shape climate change policies to be adopted domestically. It is to consolidate progress on domestic climate change policies at the multilateral level, adding cross-country constraints and global transparency to the agreed actions. This enables, for instance, a network of domestic and global civil society organizations to join forces to act as watchdogs, to ensure that policies are in line with targets. It does make a difference to have a global accounting system for greenhouse gas emissions, and to have a global registry for quantitative targets for emission reductions. These outcomes would strengthen the multilateral regulatory system, and would also give more punch to domestic pressure from civil society and opposition parties in overseeing their government’s implementation of climate change policies.

The year 2015 has become a new milestone for global climate change politics. Two crucial decisions shall be taken at COP21, if the Durban Platform is to be completed. Firstly, the review of the emission reduction commitments to seek coherence with the 2 degrees Celsius target. As pointed before, it is absolutely sure that the new IPCC report will show a serious gap between committed actions and warming trends. If parties are to take their commitments seriously, they’ll have to revise their targets upwards for the period 2015-2020. Secondly, they’ll have to decide on the new “protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force under the Convention applicable to all Parties” to be adopted no later than 2020.

The political engine is set to move. The pace and destination it will take will depend on the evolution of domestic economic and social forces over the next three years. Another important factor will be the domestic interplay of interests, and the power of pressure and advocacy groups. Bilateral and multilateral politics do have a role, but never a dominant one. Competition and coalition among nations and groups of nations, also help in shaping decisions. They’ll help to pave the way to future outcomes. But they do so by responding to domestic interests and projecting them on the global arena.

Crops that can cope with sudden fluctuations in the weather could be developed, thanks to recent discoveries about the survival mechanisms of plants. Scientists at the University of Edinburgh studying how tiny algae renew old or damaged cell proteins say their findings could be useful in developing crops suited to climates in which weather changes quickly.

They found that the speed at which protein renewal takes place determines how fast they can adapt to environmental changes, such as a sudden frost or drought.

“Until now, we knew that plants replaced their old and damaged proteins, but we had no idea how long this process took for individual proteins, or how this varied between different parts of the plant. Our findings will be useful in understanding more about how plants are programmed for survival,” says Sarah Martin of the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Systems Biology, who led the study.

Renewal rates vary between proteins according to their role and their location within cells. Proteins that carry out photosynthesis – the process that converts sunlight into energy – renew quickly because they are at risk of light damage. Conversely, proteins that protect DNA in plant cells are at little risk of damage, and renew slowly.

These findings could help breed crops incorporating proteins that respond quickly to changing conditions. Conversely, it could also assist development of high-yield crops in stable environments, where little adaptation to conditions is required.

Scientists made their discovery by developing a method to detect how quickly algae take up nitrogen – which is used to produce proteins – from their food. The study was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, and just published in the Journal of Proteome Research.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which provides policy-makers with the current state of climate science, has issued today a statement on the Durban outcome. It shows concern about the decision to “adopt a universal legal agreement on climate change as soon as possible, but not later than 2015, to be adopted and come into force from 2020.” The Durban agreement reinstates the decision to review the Copenhagen/Cancun pledges to reduce emissions in the light of the IPCC next report, to be released in 2013. The IPCC has been asked what impact these agreements will have on global warming.

The statement says that the IPCC is due to publish the first part of its next assessment report, the fifth, in 2013. But in its fourth assessment report, published in 2007, it already showed that an increase of 2 degrees Celsius could have damaging effects. It also says that greenhouse gases must fall by 2050 by 50-85% globally compared to the emissions of the year 2000, and that global emissions must peak well before the year 2020.

The IPCC says that “the series of agreements reached on Sunday by nearly 200 countries in Durban lays a foundation for the global community to tackle climate change.” But it warns “that action must be taken swiftly to cut emissions to prevent a damaging rise in world temperatures.”

See the full text of the statement.

Statement by the IPCC

13 December 2011

Action must be taken swiftly to cut emissions to prevent a damaging rise in world temperatures, Climate Panel findings show

The series of agreements reached on Sunday by nearly 200 countries in Durban lays a foundation for the global community to tackle climate change.

Governments meeting at the annual climate conference of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) decided to adopt a universal legal agreement on climate change as soon as possible, but not later than 2015, to be adopted and come into force from 2020. At the same time they recognized the need to raise their collective level of ambition to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to keep the average global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been asked what impact these agreements will have on global warming.

The IPCC, which provides policy-makers with the current state of climate science, including the impact of climate change and what can be done to tackle it, is due to publish the first part of its next assessment report, the fifth, in 2013.

But already in its fourth assessment report published in 2007, the IPCC showed that a temperature increase of 2 degrees Celsius could have a damaging effect on water supplies, biodiversity, food supplies, coastal flooding and storms and health.

The fourth assessment report shows that emissions of the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming must fall by 2050 by 50-85% globally compared to the emissions of the year 2000, and that global emissions must peak well before the year 2020, with a substantial decline after that, in order to limit the growth in global average temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. In the near term, by 2020, emissions from industrialized countries (listed in Annex I of the Kyoto Protocol) need to be reduced by 25-40% below 1990 levels, while substantial deviations from the current trend in developing countries and emerging economies will also be required

This must be borne in mind in the package. The earlier action is taken, the cheaper and more effective it will be.

Trees are dying in the Sahel, a region in Africa south of the Sahara Desert, and human-caused climate change is to blame, according to a new study led by a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Rainfall in the Sahel has dropped 20-30 percent in the 20th century, the world’s most severe long-term drought since measurements from rainfall gauges began in the mid-1800s,” said study lead author Patrick Gonzalez, who conducted the study while he was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for Forestry. “Previous research already established climate change as the primary cause of the drought, which has overwhelmed the resilience of the trees.”

The study, to appear in the Journal of Arid Environments, was based upon climate change records, aerial photos dating back to 1954, recent satellite images and old-fashioned footwork that included counting and measuring over 1,500 trees in the field. The researchers focused on six countries in the Sahel, from Senegal in West Africa to Chad in Central Africa, at sites where the average temperature warmed up by 0.8 degrees Celsius and rainfall fell as much as 48 percent.

The Sahel is one of the poorest and most vulnerable regions in the world. Recurrent famines have already killed millions of people there. Amartya Sen, the renowned economist has a classic study on the Sahel famines, published in 1983, called “Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation” (Kindle Edition available). Gonzalez says that “people in the Sahel depend upon trees for their survival. Trees provide people with food, firewood, building materials and medicine.”

The Berkeley study found that one in six trees died between 1954 and 2002. In addition, one in five tree species disappeared locally, and indigenous fruit and timber trees that require more moisture took the biggest hit. Hotter, drier conditions dominated population and soil factors in explaining tree mortality, the authors found. Their results indicate that climate change is shifting vegetation zones south toward moister areas.

“In the western U.S., climate change is leading to tree mortality by increasing the vulnerability of trees to bark beetles,” said Gonzalez, who is now the climate change scientist for the National Park Service. “In the Sahel, drying out of the soil directly kills trees. Tree dieback is occurring at the biome level. It’s not just one species that is dying; whole groups of species are dying out.”

Other co-authors of the study are Compton J. Tucker, senior earth scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and Hamady Sy, country representative for Mauritania at the Famine Early Warning Systems Network. Funding from NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey helped support this research.

Sergio Abranches, from Durban

The documents still circulating at COP17 show notable political progress, but fall short of adequately meeting the risks already pointed out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — IPCC — fourth assessment of climate science. They are still under discussion, and final decision may still be significantly different. It is likely, however, they will keep the general thrust of the documents.

Politics is rarely moved by the science on the issues requiring policy decisions. Politics is moved by interests, interactions, power competition, alliances, and conflicts. All that play a strong role to shape the global politics of climate change. At the political level there are unprecedented moves reflected on documents not yet approved by COP17 plenary.

Perhaps the most important one is the support from the United States, China, India and Brazil of a a “process to develop a Protocol or another legal instrument applicable to all Parties under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change”. This process, says the draft document, shall “begin immediately and be conducted as a matter of urgency”, so that the new working group the plenary should create can “complete its work as early as possible but no later than 2015, in order to adopt this legal instrument” at COP21. It “shall raise levels of ambition and be informed, inter alia, by the fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the outcomes of the 2013-2015 review”.

In short this means that by 2020 there should be a common legal regime on climate change encompassing all parties to the climate convention, that this legal instrument could even be a new protocol, thus legally-binding, it would have quantified mitigation targets for all major emitters. The new instrument should be ready to be adopted by 2015, at COP21. The quantitative targets should in line with the new IPCC assessment report, that should be used to guide the review of the commitments made in Copenhagen and reaffirmed on the Cancun Agreement.

The other breakthrough is the formal admission that there is a “significant gap between the aggregated effect of Parties’ mitigation pledges in terms of global annual emissions of greenhouse gases by 2020 and aggregate emissions pathways consistent with having a likely chance of holding warming below 2°C or 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”

In other words the document formally notes, and with grave concern, that there is a gap between the commitments to reduce GHG emissions and the commitment to keep the chances of warming below 2°C or 1.5°C. The 2°C is the target approved under the Copenhagen Accord, and the Cancun Agreement. The 1.5°C is a demand from the small islands states, the African Group, and the Less Developed Countries, admitted by the Cancun Agreement.

These hard to make political steps forward are a sine qua non for a more ambitious, science-based, rule-based future global climate change policy.

Sergio Abranches, from Durban

The European Union seems to be doing better in the Climate Summit than it did at the Financial Summit in Brussels last night. While in Durban, the EU is likely to get its proposal for a roadmap to a post-2020 comprehensive legal agreement on climate change, in Brussels it failed to agree to Treaty changes deemed necessary to prevent a fiscal and financial meltdown.

Yesterday US special envoy Todd Stern said his country supports the EU proposal. The US was seen as the biggest stumbling block to a Durban Agreement that would be satisfactory to most of the parties although falling short of what is already necessary to prevent very dangerous global consequences of climate change

In Brussels, the biggest stumbling block has been the United Kingdom. European leaders complained that prime-minister David Cameron held out an agreement for hours trying to get concessions to favor UK’s banks, the Financial Times reports. At the end of a long and exhaustive meeting the heads of government and states of the European Union failed to agree on changes to impose tighter fiscal rules on the eurozone. The UK will be out of the pact and several other countries, among them the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Sweden are still considering whether they’ll be on board.

The new fiscal regime has been somewhat scaled down, and negotiated among the 23 EU members only. One of the arguments holding back a treaty change is very similar to concerns being raised in Durban about a new legally-binding climate change treaty. The Financial Times reports that Germany’s insistence on a full treaty change to lay down fiscal discipline could lead to “potentially tortuous negotiations and then ratifications”, leading to more uncertainty and confusion.

A full treaty here in Durban is also feared to raise long negotiations and a rather uncertain ratification process. At least the US Senate would hardly ratify such a treaty in the foreseeable future.

In Brussels as in Durban political difficulties and lack of a shared vision make a broad consensus very unlikely, and lead to a second best solution at the very best. These “suboptimal” choices, as economists like to say, are the only possible political decisions, irrespectively of the alerts from experts about the real and present dangers ahead.

Financial meltdowns are far more visible, and have far more immediate painful consequences than climate catastrophes. Even climate related disasters as deadly floods, severe droughts, devastating hurricanes fail to change the politics behind climate change negotiations.

The consequences of acute financial crises such as deep recessions, large scale unemployment, generalized insolvency usually do move the politics behind economic policies. But it appears this is not happening this time. At least not to the degree necessary to give structural answers to the crisis.

A seasoned economist who is very knowledgeable about the dynamics of financial markets said yesterday that a systemic crisis is already in place. This means that there is a very clear and very present danger of a chain of banks insolvencies as well as of a fiscal collapse in several countries.

In Durban, ministers from almost 200 countries meet to decide on broader and stronger global measures to face the challenge of climate change. We are on the eighth year on a roll in which extreme climate events all over the world have disrupted crops, and reduced harvests raising the price of food and leading millions of poorer people into hunger. In the Horn of Africa, a famine is killing children and adults as well, as a result of a long and severe drought. Yet not decisions leading to real structural change will be made here.

Neither the visible consequences of climate change, nor the warning signs coming from science that we are too near a tipping point to feel safe will change climate politics in the near future. As in Brussels negotiators will fail to do all that is needed, and will decide on too little action too late in the game. As in Brussels, they’ll say that what they’ve agreed upon will be sufficient to face the crisis for the time being and, if needed, further action would be taken later on

Political arguments are the same no matter the subject matter of decisions. They respond to a correlation of economic and social forces that constrain their margin for decisions. However, this margin is wide enough to do more than they usually do. Power competition among major political players, ideological prejudices, personal shortcomings all have an independent influence on political decision-making, apart from the structural constraints that make the connections between economics and politics. Financial interests or the carbon interests are not to be blamed alone for the failure to decide on meaningful policies either in Brussels or in Durban.

The Durban package is taking shape, it will be presented by negotiators as an important accomplishment. But the agreement will almost surely fall short of the present scientific requirements for current emissions reductions, adaptation to climate change, and incentives to speed up the transition to a low-carbon economy.

Convergence on what the Durban package should contain has accelerated yesterday, after US lead negotiator Todd Stern said his country would support the European Union proposal for a roadmap to negotiating a legal regime by 2020. If the US really approves the roadmap it will open the way for the EU to sign into a second period of commitment under the Kyoto Protocol. The first one ends in 2012. The other point of  resistance will be the BASIC group. But Brazil and South Africa have already committed to support it. China and India will likely agree to it, although it may require framing it more creatively to calm their concerns.

Almost all negotiators say that we should wait for the fifth assessment report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) due to be released by 2013-2014 to fit targets for reductions of greenhouse gases emissions to the 2C limit to additional average global warming. The assessment report with review the scenarios for emissions and global warming to reflect the current state of the art of climate science. Yet, the fourth report’s scenarios, already show that emissions  are pointing towards more than the 2C.

Technical analyses of the commitments to reduce emissions to 2020, made in Copenhagen and reaffirmed in Cancun, already point to a 3C to 4C warming. This gap is called the “ambitions gap” in the language of climate change politics. Nevertheless the Durban Agreement will reinstate these targets as the legal ones, under the Climate Convention, and the EU and a few other countries will likely inscribe them as legally-binding targets into the second period of commitment under the Kyoto Protocol. Negotiators will commit to a revision of these targets by 2015, on the light of IPCC’s new assessment reports, to determine whether they should agree to do more. They may even pledge to decide on the political outlines of a new climate change regime by 2015, so its technical details could be worked out over the next years for it to be ready to enforce by 2020.

Too little too late. The fact is that incremental decision-making at the UNFCCC, one COP after another, is not taking the world out of the ‘business as usual‘ situation science already tells us is very likely to entail catastrophic climate change.

Though failing to meet scientific standards the Durban package will meet the expectations of the majority of players. Expectations have been lowered by the negative global economic and financial context. The African Group and the AOSIS (small island states), representing the countries most vulnerable to climate change will be satisfied with the approval of the roadmap to 2020 proposed by the European Union, and the ‘Cancun package’ making last year’s agreement fully operational. Their negotiators have already said that their priority in Durban would be getting a fully operational Green Climate Fund, and a working Executive Committee for Adaptation.

To these countries adaptation is the critical priority, far more important than mitigation, i.e. reducing emissions. They are already suffering from climate change, and need the financial and technical resources to adapt.

All countries under the broad umbrella of the G77+China, including the BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India and China), have decided that the priority in Durban is to approve a second period of commitments under the Kyoto Protocol.

To them it really doesn’t matter that the second phase of the Kyoto Protocol will cover no more than 15% of global emissions. They praise the legal architecture, and the operational mechanisms of the Protocol. China and India have gotten the lion share of resources for mitigation from the Clean Development Mechanism, (CDM). The more vulnerable countries have benefitted from the Protocol’s mechanisms to support adaptation, but they say the Green Climate Fund will be far more important to them.

Negotiators have already decided that the Green Climate Fund, the Center and Network for Clean Technology, and the Executive Committee for Adaptation will be a part of the Durban package. However, they have not reached consensus on the concrete details of this package. They also have to agree on the outlines of the new transparency regime, to guide the reporting, monitoring and verification (MRVs) of pledges made in Copenhagen, and reaffirmed in Cancun.

Finally they’ll probably consume all day today, and maybe a substantial part of Saturday, to also agree on how to frame the decision on the roadmap to a post-2020 climate change agreement that gets the support of the US, the BASIC countries, and meets the EU conditions to sign into a second period of commitment under the Kyoto Protocol.

EU Climate Change Commissioner Connie Hedegaard started her press conference today saying it was a “long night”. The “European roadmap is at the center of negotiations”, she said. If a good outcome does not come from Durban, it will “not because negotiators are not working hard to get it”. The commissioner has confirmed that the ‘Cancun package’ of operational measures to enable last year’s agreement is “almost done”.

She also mentioned the support of AOSIS, Brazil, and South Africa to the roadmap. She indicated that the US was part of a small group of 27 countries convened by midnight, that has made progress. Connie Hedegaard mentioned that China has been rather vague, and India has a tougher position. “We praise Brazil and South Africa to be already on board, and we are waiting for the other half of the BASIC.”

She stressed that the roadmap would end last century’s division among countries. All will be bound by the same regime, she explained. “Although we have made progress, we are not yet there”, she said. The central difficulty is to get agreement on a legally-binding agreement to encompass all major emitters. Hedegaard said there is no country proposing to abandon the principle of differentiated responsibilities according to their respective capacities. Only that everyone will be bound by the same legal instrument. “And time in Durban is really short. I am concerned with the pace of negotiations,” she concluded. A bit later Connie Hedegaard admitted that “from what I’ve seen by four o’clock this morning we’ll have a deal in Durban at the end. It is not the first time that we have to go beyond the official deadline to have a deal.”

Negotiators will invest a large amount of energy to get a politically satisfactory package deal, although it will hardly be a scientifically sound one.

Sergio Abranches, from Durban

COP17 president, South African minister of Foreign Relations Maite Emily Nkoana-Mashabane has asked a small group of parties to facilitate the final negotiations towards a package deal to be delivered in Durban. It is a sign that negotiations are moving towards a close. There still are some key issues pending a compromise solution, but all negotiators indicated they’ll cooperate to get the best outcome possible.

The outcome in Durban will be a compromise solution, and the outlines of the package deal to be agreed upon begins to show on the nuances of negotiators’ new statements to the press. Bits and pieces of a coming deal can also be collected on the corridors of the Durban Convention Center.

Connie Hedegaard, EU Commissioner for Climate Action, said the European Union is ready to take a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol (‘second KP’). She said the EU must be assured that others will agree on a new legally binding framework. Europe will sign into a ‘second KP’ even if other countries choose not to join. The EU is not requiring the ‘roadmap’ towards a future legal agreement to go into too many details. It should just show there is a firm decision to arrive at a new agreement, and a timeline with a few significant deadlines. Ideally the agreement should be completed by 2015, to be in force from 2020 onwards, replacing both the Kyoto Protocol, the Copenhagen Accord, and the Cancun Agreement.

US lead negotiator, Todd Stern, often cited as the main opponent to the idea of a commitment to a legally-binding agreement, said his country would have no difficulty to sign into a legally-binding agreement that binds all major emitters with equal legal force. He said he wouldn’t object to agreeing on a process to lead to this agreement. The US would rather discuss the process, and let its unfolding define the legal nature of the outcome, than defining the legal form beforehand, to design a process to get to it. It seems that the EU and the US are fine-tuning their views to move towards a deal that satisfies both.

Todd Stern said he didn’t think China, India, and Brazil are ready to sign into a binding agreement that would give identical legal treatment to developed and emerging nations. No problem there, he said. Commitments  that are not legally-binding, like the ones made in Copenhagen and reaffirmed in Cancun, are politically and morally binding.

He added that the US has no quarrels with the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities, and respective capacity” under a new legal agreement, provided that ‘capacity’ is also taken into account. He said the US interprets this principle as leading to a ‘continuum of responsibilities’, rather than to as a firewall separating in absolute terms all developing countries from the developed or industrialized ones. The US major concern is with the idea that the principle be applied to prevent even the larger emerging powers to have binding emissions targets. Today, they insist their pledges are voluntary, and demand that all developed countries have mandatory targets.

Chinese minister Xie Zenhua said to the plenary of Cop17 high level segment yesterday that China wants a future legally-binding agreement under the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. He arrived in Durban saying that China could accept binding emissions reduction targets.

Negotiators were clearly more confident yesterday night that an agreement might be possible here in Durban. One of them said that the negotiations that started yesterday evening and would continue throughout the day today could be a “watershed”. COP17 will anyway close a chapter of the negotiations that has been opened years ago. It is the last stop before the first period of commitments under the Kyoto Protocol ends. The mandate of the working group created in 2005, during COP11, and the first Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol to decide on other commitment periods will be completed in Durban one way or another. The Protocol will very likely be amended to have a second period to 2020.

Negotiators are clearly making every effort to prevent COP17 from failing. There is a noticeable concern to reach an outcome as significant as possible, in large part as a deference to Africa, the continent most vulnerable to climate change. They are really engaged in the efforts to ensure a second period of commitment under the Kyoto Protocol. The plea made by the Africans at the beginning of COP17 that Africa does not become the graveyard for the Protocol appears to have impressed them all. The risk of a breakdown of the Kyoto Protocol has been progressively reduced by intense negotiations.

The EU is conceding more than it seemed to be willing to concede when negotiations began. The BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India and China), the stronger group within G77+China, is participating of all decisions. South Africa, presiding COP17, is doing its best to make this African climate summit to succeed. Brazil is among the facilitators in the talks leading to the completion of  a package deal. Brazilian negotiators will feel responsible for the package deal, as its coauthors. China arrived in Durban announcing it wants to play a game of cooperation, differently from previous COPs, when China blocked progress in several key issues. India has been striving to ensure parties and press that its position is not different from China’s. The BASIC will likely have a common positive standing on negotiations.

The president of the African Group, Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu, said the Africans have a “vested interest in the success of COP17”. “It is a very important meeting for us in Africa,” he added. None of the demands of the African Group he mentioned seem too difficult to get the support from all negotiators in Durban. The African Group’s minimum expectations are to have a ratifiable second period of commitments under the Kyoto Protocol (‘second KP’), making the Green Climate Fund fully operational, even if some issues remain to be solved later on. “We don’t want it to be an empty shell. But let’s first make sure we have the shell, an then fill it”, he argued. He also said it would be necessary to go back to the Climate Convention fundamentals, through a process that could lead to a future legally-binding deal.

In short, to Africa, the expected package deal would be: the ‘second KP’, the ‘Cancun Package’, to make the Cancun Agreement fully operational, with special reference to the Green Climate Fund, and a ‘process’ to lead to a future common legal framework binding all. Something around these lines, perhaps with a few adjustments to reach a compromise leading to consensus, is likely to be approved at the final plenary.

The Durban outcome will very likely have all the elements demanded by the African Group. There are indications that until 2020 the commitments made in Copenhagen, and built into the UNFCCC tracks by the Cancun Agreement will be considered ‘legal’ commitments, although not ‘fully binding’ commitments. The countries that would sign into the ‘second KP would make their Cancun commitments ‘fully binding’. In other words all commitments to 2020 will be politically binding under the legal framework of the Convention, a smaller portion would also be legally binding under the Kyoto Protocol.

These commitments would be reviewed in 2015, on the basis of IPCC’s fifth report to be approved in 2013-2014. The parties could then decide to raise their ambitions regarding emissions reductions to bring them closer to the findings of climate science. After 2020, a new legal framework will be put in place to regulate actions to meet the climate change challenge.

The Durban outcome is likely to be a mix of some action, and new processes leading to future action.

Sergio Abranches, from Durban

COPs look all alike, regardless the sometimes radical change of their environment, from freezing streets to sunny beach promenades. Their first week, called “technical segment” looks pretty much like their second week, called the high-level segment. The difference? The second week is more crowded, and ‘politicos’, having ministerial rank, take charge of negotiations. To expedite a solution they tend to set technical considerations aside and focus on the wording of resolutions that might appear significant enough to justify calling them an “agreement”, a “roadmap”, a “plan for action”, or a “process”. 

COP17 high level segment started yesterday in Durban with a call for action from all speakers, from the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon to South African president, Jacob Zuma. But it seems the parties to the Climate Convention are not ready for action. They’ll choose ‘process’ over action. The final outcome will very likely be a downsized second period of commitment under the Kyoto Protocol, covering about 15% of global emissions, and a ‘process’ to guide negotiations to a post-2020 legally-binding agreement, to cover more than 80% of global emissions. Intense negotiations by the ‘politicos’ are trying to break the many interconnected gridlocks to make this happen.

By mid-week, last week, negotiators of the so-called technical segment were hopeful they’d be able to close a package deal to make the Cancun agreements fully operational. The ‘Cancun Package’ should deliver a fully operational Green Climate Fund, with assurance from donor countries that cash deposits would be forthcoming in the first weeks of 2012; financial and  policy mechanisms to support adaptation of developing countries to climate change; put in place a Technology Center and Network ready to start operations; set up a global accounting system for greenhouse gas emissions and a mechanism for the reporting and evaluation of parties’ emissions reduction pledges. But last Friday it was clear they’d failed to close the package deal.

Intense negotiations on these ‘technical’ matters continue, while negotiators keep trying to solve the major political hurdle of this COP17. The hurdle? How to ensure a second period of commitment under the Kyoto Protocol, even though a quite lean one, and how to move on towards the dreamed goal of having a rules-based agreement binding all major emitters, developed and developing. Parties want this “second KP”, as they call it because it would keep alive the legal structure and the operational mechanisms for finance and technological cooperation that are a part of the Protocol. Its contribution to the fight against climate change, though, would be a modest one. The second round of commitments will make legally-binding the pledges to reduce emissions made in Copenhagen by the countries that are a party to it, and reaffirmed in Cancun under the track of the Climate Convention.

The future treaty should replace the Kyoto Protocol, the Copenhagen Accord, and the Cancun Agreement by 2020. As anyone who browses COPs agendas will immediately see these issues are not new at all. COP 11, in Montreal, in 2005, created the “ad hoc working group” (AWG-KP) to decide on the second period of commitment under the Kyoto Protocol. The ‘Bali Action Plan’ decided at COP 13, in 2007, to create the “ad hoc working group” (AWG-LCA) to undertake “a comprehensive process to enable the full, effective and sustained implementation of the Convention through long-term cooperative action, now, up to and beyond 2012”. The decision also determined that the working group should “complete its work in 2009 and present the outcome” to the COP15, in Copenhagen. In other words, a ‘process’ was defined to lead the working group to propose the draft of a legally-binding agreement that should be approved by the parties at COP15, in Copenhagen, in 2009.

Neither group has fulfilled its mandate. COP15 failed to decide on both issues, and the mandate of the two working groups was extended for one more year, so that they could report to COP16, in Cancun. Negotiators in Cancun did little more than make the Copenhagen Accord official, by bringing its decisions into the UN negotiating tracks, and to fill in a bit more of detail on the ‘work in progress’ towards a second period of  commitment under the Kyoto Protocol, and a future binding agreement. Sure, the mandates of the two working groups were again extended until COP17, in Durban.

We are now at COP17, in Durban, and the best scenario for the outcome taking shape here would be a second period of commitment under the Kyoto Protocol, with fewer parties signing into it, than those who agreed to the first one. This ‘second KP’ would cover about 15% of global emissions, down from the 26% covered by the ‘first KP’. Parties will obviously cheer the full accomplishment of the mandate given to the ‘ad hoc working group’, and praise the work done by its chairs, and co-chairs, and all the parties who ‘constructively’ contributed to the successful closing of their work. From what they’ve been saying on side events and press conferences so will a good part of the environmentalists here in Durban. On the future treaty, COP17 would likely decide on “a comprehensive process to enable” the drafting of a comprehensively legally-binding agreement to be in force no later than 2020. There level of ambitions has been significantly lowered by both governments and many environmentalist organizations. The present level of ambitions may be more realistic. This outcome is nevertheless very frustrating, and severely enlarges the gap between commitments to action and the scientific requirements to meet the climate change challenge.

Connie Hedegaard, EU Commissioner for Climate Action, has said on the official opening of the high level segment that the EU is ready to take a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol. But, she added, the EU must be assured that others will agree on a new legally binding framework. Framework, not agreement, one should be reminded.

The best-case scenario has become one in which the EU and a few other countries sign into a ‘second KP’, and the other major parties agree to ‘framework’, with some comfortable deadlines.

There is a worst-case scenario, but they’ll work hard to prevent it from happening. If it nevertheless prevails, a group of parties demanding more concrete results might not be happy with just a ‘framework’, and with the looks of the ‘Cancun Package’, and would rather veto a decision. If this ‘kamikaze’ attitude is interpreted by the presidency as ‘lack of consensus or unanimity’, the ‘second KP’ might become a ‘unilateral declaration’ by parties; and the ‘future agreement’ would remain a rather fuzzy promise.

When unable to agree on a decision, negotiators use to write the clauses under brackets. If one peruses the “amalgamation document” with the views of parties on a future agreement, one will see the same brackets at the same places for about five years. There has been no major breakthrough on relevant issues.

Decisions are not forthcoming even on what has already been decided before, requiring only a few relatively simple operational details to be implemented. That’s what is holding the implementation on finance, technology, and adaptation. On the transparency regime, brackets tell us they can’t even decide whether accounting will have a ‘framework’ or a ‘system’. On the Green Climate Fund they are struggling to determine whether it will work under the ‘guidance’ or under the ‘authority’ of the COP.

How to explain this resilience of the status quo ante, COP after COP, this slow incremental progress of political decisions aiming at a global climate change governance regime? They all know the science. They all know they’re dealing with a global threat. Most of the countries that are parties to the Climate Convention and the Kyoto Protocol, have faced some hardship caused by extreme climate events. They are all implementing carbon reducing policies at home. Most know how urgent it is to achieve a level of cooperation among high emitters to act together to cut emissions. And all of them would acknowledge that on their press conferences. But they all behave conservatively in the conference rooms. They are still captured the the dominant interests of the high carbon economy. But there are other domestic forces already interested to move towards a low carbon economy. Market forces are changing, and social support to change is already a majority of public opinion in most countries. Public opinion has not turned into active political opinion yet. However, on balance, most governments have more room to change policies today than governments had ten years ago. Yet they are still resistant to change views in multilateral negotiations.

EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard complained on her twitter @CHedegaardEU that “sometimes messages are more progressive at public press conferences than in negotiation rooms…”

A journalist asked UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon yesterday if there is something wrong about the UN process, given that the parties are dealing with the same deadlocks for years. He said there is nothing wrong with the UN process. Negotiators are dealing with difficult decisions for their countries. Sometimes member countries the political will to move forward, he argued.

There is, however, something deadly wrong about the UN process, and not only on UNFCCC. The Security Council has been criticized for not being able to adequately deal with global security issues. A thorough UN reform has been on the agenda for years to no avail. The UN has become a machine that works almost always on low gears, having enormous difficulty to deliver meaningful and prompt decisions. Its rules are end up by maintaining the status quo, rather than promoting change. Even its own reform tends to stall.

The UN decision-making process is based either on an unanimity rule, the case of the UNFCCC, or on a regime of “selective veto power”, as in the Security Council. The unanimity rule gives, in principle, a veto power to all parties, since any country’s positive vote becomes pivotal for a decision to be made. In the case of the Security Council, a few countries have veto power since the times of the Cold War. This distribution of veto power didn’t change, although global geopolitics has thoroughly changed since the 1980’s at the very least.

The United States, one of the beneficiaries of the immutable status quo in the Security Council, strongly criticizes the ‘1992 division between developed and developing countries’, arguing that domestic and global realities changed very much, and this firewall is no longer acceptable.

China, is perfectly comfortable to be treated as a full power in the Security Council and as a developing country under the UNFCCC. This means it has the same voice as the major developed powers, and benefits from a veto power several developed countries don’t have, when deciding on global security matters. But it can, at the same time, demand differentiated obligations regarding global climate security, as a member of G77+China. Washington, and most of the EU, would like China to be treated as a full power both at the Security Council and at the UNFCCC. Connie Hedegaard referred today to the “real developing” countries, meaning of course that that are countries that are no longer truly “developing”. They belong to an intermediate category of emerging powers, China on the topmost position.

We live in a changing world. There are new threats to global security, that go far beyond the nuclear threat of Cold War times. Several studies show that climate change has become a major threat to global security. Yet the UN rules ‘freeze’ the players into outdated positions. The players’ stakes in decision-making do not match their real stakes regarding present global threats. An uneven playing field and rules that multiply veto players make it extraordinarily difficult to change the status quo. They contribute to maintain the status quo, or what, in the language of climate change modeling would be called ‘business as usual’. The reference used in the  IPCC scenarios, for instance, to determine the likely consequences of no new action is ‘business as usual’, aka the status quo. Yet the rules of global climate change politics strengthen the resilience of the status quo. They favor a ‘business as usual’ attitude.

Action to meet the climate change challenge will hardly come from the UNFCCC decision-making. The Climate Convention will always reflect with some delay what countries are already doing domestically. A ‘top down’ approach is unlikely to ever meet the scientific requirements for global climate change policy, especially if countries are doing less than science tells them they would need to do. Besides, some countries resist to write into an international treaty even what they are doing domestically. This is the case of both the US and China.

China has been doing more domestically that it has pledged to do in Copenhagen. One can no longer infer China’s progress on curbing emissions and building a low-carbon economy from what Chinese negotiators do and say at the Climate Convention.  It would be no sacrifice for China to write its Copenhagen pledges, officially reaffirmed in Cancun, into a multilateral legally-binding instrument. As it would not be any harder for China to review these targets upwards by 2015.

The United States is in a more awkward situation. Brazil and China can say their Copenhagen/Cancun commitments are legally-binding domestically, because they are a part of their climate change laws. The US Congress failed to approve such a law. US negotiators impose several conditions to move forward, but offer very little as a quid pro quo. The US senate is known to be very reluctant to ratify international treaties. It has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, and negotiators can do nothing to assure the other parties a new treaty would be ratified. All US negotiators can say is that their Copenhagen/Cancun commitments are “politically and morally” binding. Todd Stern, US lead negotiator said that much on his press conference today.

The structural political foundations of the UN system do not enable the parties to the Climate Convention to decide on effective and urgent action to face risks created by climate change. Why it would still be advisable to keep the UNFCCC alive and working? First of all, because it has value as a place to consolidate an institutional framework that could lay the foundations for a future regime for climate change governance. This regime will come from a bottom up process whereby increasingly more robust domestic climate change policies are incorporated into UNFCCC’s system of rules. Decisions on domestic policies will  come faster than consensus can be built at COP plenaries. Secondly, the UNFCCC provides an important environment for global political interaction, promoting tolerance towards the diversity of points of view, arguments, and cultural references. It  exposes parties to each others’ realities and  enhances solidarity.

One could say that the UNFCCC belongs to the pre-history of a cosmopolitan global democracy, supporting the global governance of several key global issues, especially climate change. This regime of governance without government will benefit from this pluralist environment with some capacity to prevent extreme positions and reduce radical polarizations that tend to cause systemic breakdowns.