Hope shifting to Cape Town 2011

As hope has just about been abandoned by most for reaching a global, legally binding accord on the fight against climate change in December this year in Mexico, attention and anticipation are shifting already to the next (after Mexico) international United Nations conference on the subject, scheduled for 2011 in Cape Town, South Africa.

At that point, a South African could well play a key role in negotiations as the possible new head of the United Nations body in charge of negotiations, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), after Yvo de Boer announced that he is stepping down from the position.

South Africa’s Minister of Tourism Marthinus van Schalkwyk is one of the six candidates who have been nominated for appointment to the position by UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki Moon. The other candidates are Dr Tariq Banuri (Pakistan), Christiana Figueres (Costa Rica), Janos Pasztor (Hungary), Vijai Sharma (India) and Elizabeth Thompson (Barbados).

In the immediate wake of the all but collapse of talks in Copenhagen in December last year, De Boer already said he doubted that a legally binding deal would be reached in 2010. He expected the best outcome from Mexico would be if countries agreed to the basic architecture "so that a year later, you can decide or not decide to turn that into a treaty" at the 2011 meeting in South Africa.

As developed countries battle to reconcile their domestic political and economic realities with the roles they have to play to have global climate change efforts succeed, whatever hope there still was of reaching a legally binding deal in Mexico evaporated last week when proposed climate change legislation was put on indefinite hold in the senate of the United States.

But that was not the only setback from the developed world. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel quietly moved away from her goal of a binding agreement on limiting climate change to 2 degrees Celsius. She further has sent out signals at the European Union level that she no longer supports the idea of Europe ‘going it alone’.

The extent to which the climate debate has become entangled with the domestic politics of individual countries, particularly in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007 and the global recession of 2009, is well illustrated by the main reason why the US legislation was put on hold:  the Senate’s Democratic leadership first wants to proceed with a controversial immigration Bill.

In Germany, Chancellor Merkel has changed her stance after the failure in Copenhagen and the failure to persuade more countries to come on board in a joint push for emissions reductions. If Merkel is no longer fighting on the international stage to achieve the two-degree target, how can she convince her fellow Germans that they have to change anything? A domestic temperature target would be absurd, commentators say.

The challenge of reaching a global accord on fighting climate change was well illustrated by a statement last week from ministers representing the Basic group (Brazil, South Africa, India, China) of countries, in which they urged all so-called “Annex 1”' countries (rich nations) to raise their level of ambition on greenhouse gas mitigation. They further reiterated that it would be impossible for developing countries to implement mitigation actions in the absence of commitments by developed countries to the provision of finance for developing countries.

The ministers, who gathered for a third meeting in Cape Town on Sunday, emphasised that equity would be decisive for reaching any climate agreement.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the climate change agenda has become so politically driven that all sorts of competing interests, economic and otherwise, increasingly are becoming integrated with it.

Climate change is no longer a matter of only science but also of geopolitics. The expectation spectacularly collapsed at Copenhagen. Without improved capacity to deal with geopolitical concerns, the changes of the success are unlikely to improve.

In this respect, organisations such as BASIC – as had emerged already in Copenhagen, when a complete collapse of talks was avoided at the death of the conference – could play an increasingly important role in eventually attaining that elusive dream of a legally binding accord.

A “Cape Town Accord” may turn out to be the one that takes the globe past the life of the Kyoto Protocol which runs out next year.