Durban COP-17 news

Headlines so far -- we are headed for 4 degrees of climate chaos with current emissions targets, rich countries failed to fulfil their pledges to climate action funds, and Canada-US-Russia-Japan helped scuttle Kyoto. REDD negotiators approved "forest reference levels", and  safeguards for vulnerable populations ("Guidelines on FPIC"). If these  prove to be enforceable, that will be good news.

Beginning with the most readable reports: the blog by Judy Lumb, QEW delegate to Durban, and the UK Guardian's excellent round-up of Durban articles. I question the latter's hopeful verdict that Durban brings a binding climate treaty "in sight". At best, it is a promise to negotiate one by 2020. But such promises have been broken many times. South Africa's Business Day editorializes, "Depending on your viewpoint, the Durban- hosted United Nations climate change talks (COP-17) were either successful or a complete failure. The negotiations delivered a deal, one that at least allows SA, as COP-17 host, to hold up its head in international multilateral negotiation circles. But from the perspective of saving the planet from what science tells us will be irreversible and damaging climate change, it was a dismal failure."

Detailed critiques along these lines can be found in climate-justice-now.org's compilation. See especially those by TWN, IBON; and Nele Mariel on the loopholes in REDD and climate finance. See also the report to Consultancy Africa Intelligence.

Some personal stories from Africa are in http://www.c17.org.za/_blog/Climate, and in its Resources page:

Ploughshares not swords - December 5 (126 KB)

and side events “ENB on the side” reports including:

CC story of honeybush farmers of Ericaville, South Africa, over the last five years

Belize protected areas

REDD projects using a human rights approach

REDD: a comparative survey by CIFOR forestry experts.
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Pictures are worth a thousand words: see the stands of corporate lobbies at Durban, S. African waste pickers' protest, the Caravan of Hope by small farmers, women, cooperatives and unions; video of Canada's shameful withdrawal from Kyoto; reactions by Canadian youth delegates (blog and podcasts, videos) and by US youth delegates.

To quote US expert Joe Romm's Climate Progress blog 24 Dec 2011 (whose full text is worth reading): "It is increasingly unlikely that we will adopt the aggressive but low-net-cost policies needed to stabilize at 450 ppm atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, and then quickly come back to 350 — thanks in large part to the deniers, along with their political pals and media enablers. Delay is very risky and expensive." He quotes the International Energy Association: "Every year of delay adds an extra USD 500 billion to the investment needed between 2010 and 2030 in the energy sector”. Rather than being cut, world emissions are even rising faster than previous Business-As-Usual (BAU) forecasts. The IEA's 2011 Energy Outloook says, “rising fossil energy use will lead to irreversible and potentially catastrophic climate change” and “we are on an even more dangerous track to an increase of 6°C."

For policy analyses: see Canada's Climate Action Network and WCCE, Third World Network's climate news, Climate-Connections, the semi-official IISD report Assessing the Outcomes of COP17 ("There is a clear trade-off between the level of ambition and the inclusivity and robustness of a future agreement". The Durban deal gave "flexibility, particularly for major emitters" and "many entrenched divisions remain"). The COP17 Civil Society site's Resources page contains many preliminary reports from the Durban committees. The centrist Wuppertal Institute foresees at best a period of "shifting alliances" on emissions targets, green technology transfer, and carbon trading: "The endgame of the Durban Platform…might be a very substantial share of global emissions being covered by domestic emissions trading systems." WI report On the Road Again, p.38.

"Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget us" -- Finnish writer Henrik Tikkanen.

Towards an eco-theology -- Latin American voices

Reprinted from World Council of Churches news, 30 Mar 2011. The author, Dr Marcelo Schneider, has been working as assistant to the WCC Central Committee moderator since 2006. He lives in Porto Alegre, Brazil and writes for several Latin American ecumenical and church-related news agencies.

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The father of the Kyoto treaty, Argentina's ambassador Raul Estrada Oyuela (see his biog), spoke on the international diplomatic framework on climate change, in a seminar held 28 - 29 March at the Protestant theological school Instituto Universitario ISEDET in Buenos Aires.

 
 

The accepted axiom is, as the climate changes so the world, too, will change in dramatic and sometimes undesirable ways.

What does this often rapid change mean to Christians whose faith is intertwined with the glory and beauty of God’s creation, but challenged when that creation is corrupted and irreversibly altered?

Is the churches’ current theological reflection on stewardship and climate change ready for the rapid shifting of winds, weather, and life on earth as we know it and our grandparents knew it?

These questions were enough to prompt a variety of churches in Argentina to explore the "Christian faith and ecology: towards an eco-ecumenical theology",

The event was sponsored by ISEDET, the non-governmental Argentina-based Rural Reflection Group and the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF) Latin America and Caribbean region and was supported by the World Council of Churches (WCC) and the United Church of Canada.

An imperative concern for nature

"Climate changes occur very rapidly and have astonishing consequences,” said Dr Alfredo Salibian, an Argentinian biologist in an address to the group. “We are witnessing changes in our own lives, not only in relation to the context in which our parents or grandparents lived, but in relation to twenty, ten or five years ago."
Salibian proposed the addition of the prefix "eco" to theology, reflecting an imperative, urgent concern for nature. "We have to recall that the redemption offered by Jesus Christ is bidirectional,” he said. “On one side it is vertical because it allows for the restoration of relations of human beings with the Creator. But we tend to neglect the other part of this relationship, which is horizontal, which aims to heal the damaged relations between human beings and the rest of God's creation.” Therefore it is time to update Latin American theology, incorporating the prefix "eco" to redefine the meaning of "creation", "Christ", “human being” and "ecumenism" in light of stewardship for creation.
But it goes even further than that, says the father of the Kyoto Protocol, Raul Estrada Oyuela, who spoke on the international diplomatic framework linked to the theme of climate change at the event.

Theology and politics

Oyuela warned that the lack of mutual understanding between theology and politics could be damaging. "If we do not understand what happens in politics, it will be very difficult to interfere in the construction of policies," he said. Oyuela chaired the group created by the First Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to negotiate a legally binding instrument on climate change today known as the Kyoto Protocol.
"There are many people from the member churches of the World Council of Churches in international diplomatic circles that deal with environmental issues,” he said, pressing the issue that the church can influence power. “If theologically, the WCC proposes ethical reference points, why not strengthen the process of awareness raising and advocacy among these actors, so that the agenda has a more significant impact on the final results of the negotiations?"
"We Christians warned, some years ago, about the urgent need to promote an ethic of social responsibility on the management of natural resources and care for creation, something we called 'stewardship for creation'”, Salibian reminded the audience. “This concept still is in opposition to the current dominant school of thought asserting the supremacy of economy over nature, which becomes oppressive to many humans, and breaks the relationships of people with nature."
Reinforcing the need for a review of the Latin American theology, the WCC programme executive on climate change, Dr Guillermo Kerber, from Uruguay, added that one of the main impacts of climate change on theology is the emerging need to reform the theological understanding of creation. "What is the place of the human being in creation and in relation to it? We need an epistemological change of our theology in relation to ecology," Kerber said.

“Peace with the earth”

One of the methodological efforts made during the event has been the attempt to explain the links between violence, peace-building and care for creation. This reflects one of the main themes, “peace with the earth”, of the upcoming International Ecumenical Peace Convocation (IEPC) being held 17-25 May in Kingston, Jamaica and sponsored by the WCC, the Caribbean Conference of Churches and the Jamaica Council of Churches.

Emerging from the seminar in Argentina is a holistic view trying to build on the acknowledgement that the environmental crisis resulting from climate change has economic, political and spiritual components.

The impact of climate change, particularly on migration, is leading to an ethically-based debate on the issue of justice involving the testimony of the most vulnerable groups such as women, impoverished and indigenous people.

"We must recognize that justice is a central theme in the Bible. The God of the Bible is a God of justice who does justice. Therefore, we include in our theology the issue of 'eco-justice'", said Kerber.

This is not the first time that the WCC and its member churches have been supporting dialogue and reflection on ecology and theology in Argentina.

In addition to an event under the theme "Man and His Environment" in 1974, there was also a seminar in 1990 on "Crisis, Ecology and Social Justice". The seminar, hosted by ISEDET, was held in preparation of the Call for Justice Peace and Integrity of Creation (JPIC), held that year in Seoul, South Korea.

G8 leaders: all gas and no brakes

crash: strange dangers
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Avaaz Titanic ad for Bali talks, Dec 2007
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At the G8 summit in Japan, Harper, Fukuda, and Bush are trying to block any reference to UNFCCC climate targets for the year 2020 -- just as they did at Bali in Dec 2007, where global protest turned the tide. Negotiators from the South rose, one after another, to demand that the spoilers step aside. NGOs launched petitions -- including an Avaaz letter signed by 320,000 members in the final 72 hours. In tomorrow`s Financial Times, Avaaz will run another petition with a satirical advertisement. It will be delivered to the hotel room of every G8 delegate, so that no leader can ignore the political cost of shirking responsibility.

What the political leaders of the rich nations should be doing:
See the world's leading climate science and policy experts including James E. Hansen, Gwyn Prins, David Steven, Alex Evans, Shuzo Nishioka, and Ted Nordhaus on video

Friends of the Earth ask the G8 to block the World Bank's controversial Climate Investment Funds (ex-Clean Technology Fund)' currently supported by the United States, the UK and Japan and their corporate friends, who hope to reap $billion profits on technology transfers to the 3rd world, especially China. According to FOE, the WB scheme will

• undermine the UNFCCC post-Kyoto talks,
• increase debt,
• pay polluters [both in the 3rd world and the 1st world, especially coal companies - Ed.]
• threaten Indigenous Peoples' land rights through the Bank's forestry offset funds

Greenpeace calls on the G8 to:

• increase public investment in research and development on ecological and climate change-resilient farming
• stop funding for GE crops and prohibit patents on seeds
• phase out the most toxic chemicals and eliminate environmentally destructive agricultural subsidies;
• protect domestic food production and drop mandatory targets to increase the ratio of biofuels used in transport.

[see our previous post on G8 and the food summit - Ed.]
also
George Monbiot's analysis of the Bali talks; NY Times analysis of Hokkaido results.
Yelena Zagorodnaya`s report on Fukuda's climate promises at Davos in Jan 2008.
Olive Heffernan`s Hokkaido blog for Nature magazine.

350 ppm: "the most important number in the world" - Bill McKibben

Click on 350 to see animation

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Earth climate map: US DOE

Last December, while industrial nations dithered and ducked the issue at Bali, chief NASA scientist James Hansen declared that the planet's air already contained 385 ppm of CO2, increasing by 2 ppm yearly, and that anything above a 350 ppm "tipping point" invites catastrophe.(1)

Tufts University researchers have just put a price tag on delay; by 2100 global warming will cost the US economy $3.8 trillion a year! This bombshell news is the equivalent of the Stern Report in the UK.(2)

Significantly, the corporate elite of Davos (the World Economic Forum) and the WBCSD (World Business Council on Sustainable Development) are now in Japan at the G8 meeting, demanding action on climate change.(3)

By the standards of the market itself, "business as usual" is a dangerous and losing proposition. President Bush, Prime Minister Harper, the Wall Street Journal, the oil and coal lobbies, and a host of well-paid deniers have painted themselves into a corner.

The last six months have seen an unprecedented coming-together of environmental groups in the USA and around the world. For example: in 350.org McKibben's Step It Up has partnered with the new 1sky coalition, Al Gore's ACP and We campaigns, Peter Barnes, the Rainforest Action Network, Vandana Shiva and the India Youth Climate Network, Quaker Earthcare Witness, Van Jones and his "green jobs" following among black Americans, to name only a few. Their allies include Greenpeace, Sierra, Friends of the Earth, Avaaz.org, Paul Hawken's Wiser Earth (itself a network of over 100,000 organizations), the Suzuki Foundation, Pembina Institute, Natural Resources Defense Council, FCNL, NAE's CreationCare, COEJL, the Union of Concerned Scientists, SOS-Live Earth, Earth Charter and many others.(4)

McKibben says we no longer have 10 years to decide. The window is closing -- the post-Kyoto framework, to be decided by heads of state at CSD-17 in December 2009 in Copenhagen, is "our last chance at a low-carbon future".

350.org's petition to the US Congress, calling for an 80% reduction of CO2 by 2050, may have helped defeat the "greenwash" Lieberman-Warner bill by focusing mass political protest on its billions of dollars in porkbarrel subsidies to fossil fuel and nuclear interests. Now the protest is becoming an organized political movement.

Also new is environmentalists' use of social networking aka Web 2.0 or ASN: MySpace, Facebook, Changents, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Google Groups and Yahoo Groups are bringing local and global youth, artists, musicians, green businessmen, preachers and housewives (as well as innumerable private donations) into the campaign. See by way of example Agent350. It is likely that GlobalVoicesOnline, as well as this summer's international youth conference of TakingITGlobal and and the upcoming World Social Forums will bring even more energy and contributions. We have just seen this phenomenon playing out in the Barack Obama campaign.

At the beginning of 2007, McKibben led a march across New England that turned into a living witness for earthcare (see our previous blog about interfaith action). Step It Up expected hundreds of scattered demonstrations for action on climate change during the year. It got thousands. Simultaneously, young leaders across North America were clamoring to become community organizers for Al Gore's climate action project.

The Bush administration and its fossil fuel allies overplayed their hand for six years -- gutting the EPA, refusing cap-and-trade, deregulating futures markets (cf. the Enron and commercial paper collapses, and recent oil price speculation), allowing corporate lobbyists to write new laws and regulations, building massive perverse subsidies into the Clean Air Act, and starting a $3 trillion war for oil in Iraq.

Their very success has caused a backlash. Faced with flat refusal by the Bush administration, cities and groups of states began their own initiatives to reduce emissions and set up carbon trading exchanges.(5) In a recent Pew survey 74% of the American public call global warming a serious issue, but only 35% say it should be a top priority for the next president. A UK survey shows a majority of voters influenced by skeptics. The battle for public opinion is not over. It must be noted that just when the environmental movement surged, so did the well-funded network of climate change deniers and their fellow travellers.

[Omitted from this article are other less-politicized groups such as

• the NASCA alliance of city, regional, state and national (US-Canada) initiatives to reduce their carbon footprint, with help from William Rees' One Earth Initiative, GUSSE and CIRS; with their counterparts on other continents in
  
• the UN Marrakech Process aka SCP and 10YFP; see also Wikipedia on Marrakech and SCP
  
• scientific networks involved in data-exchange, eco-system modelling and governance.

We will try to cover these in future reports. -- Ed.]

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Footnotes
(1) Hansen et al., "Target atmospheric CO2: Where should humanity aim?", submitted 7 Apr 08 to Open Atmospheric Science Journal, available pre-publication on arXiv:0804.1126v2. "If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm." Also Hansen and others in Chesapeake Climate Action Network . Recent evidence suggests major recalculation may be necessary: Arctic and Antarctic ice melt, methane release from thawing permafrost, pine beetle damage, ocean acidification and sea level rise, species loss, drought, wildfires, hurricanes, seasonal and eco-zone disruption, body burdens of toxics, spread of diseases like SARS and asthma, suggest the tipping point may be even lower. See the scientific debate in RealClimate. and Gather.com.

This does not prevent climate change deniers, quibblers, lobbyists and fellow travelers from urging, in the name of "economic stability" a much higher threshold than 350 ppm: e.g. Joseph Romm , Cato Institute blog. Alex Steffen offers a "green capitalist" perspective on these folk in Worldchanging.com.

(2) See the Canadian equivalent of the Stern report; the Harper government refused to act on it.

(3) See lists of affiliated organizations here and here. WWF Canada's The Good Life, and WWF-IUCN Connect2Earth are also using social networks.

(4) But the WBCSD and UNDP call for a 50% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050, compared to the 350.org goal of 80% -- a major difference. For a detailed study of what a post-Kyoto framework must do, see Oliver Tickell's Kyoto2: How to Manage the Global Greenhouse (to be published July 2008, summarized on his website).

(5) See NYT 6 May 2007, Brookings Institution report Oct 2007. A meaningful framework must include real caps on emissions with successive stepdowns or "wedges", and a worldwide carbon trading system to bid up the price of pollution. As the EU's experience shows, such a "cap and trade" system will require close watching at every stage to keep it honest. Even if CO2 is stabilized, its level will persist for at least a century: New Scientist 12 Oct 2006

Further reading

• Bill McKibben's original call to action, "Remember This: 350 ppm," Washington Post 27 Dec 07
• James Kunstler "Driving towards Disaster," Washington Post 25 May o8 reprinted in this blog
• Mark Lynas, "Climate chaos is inevitable" The Guardian 12 June 2008, his blog and books High Tide: News from a Warming World and Fragile Earth: Views of a Changing World.
• George Monbiot, Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning, summarized previously in this blog.
• James Hansen's recent presentations on the 350 ppm threshold.