A deal in Durban
IN THE early hours of December 11th, after three days and nights of exhausting, often ill-tempered final negotiations, the United Nations' two-week-long climate-change summit in Durban ended with an agreement. Its termseven assuming they are acted uponare unlikely to prevent a global temperature rise of more than 2C, which is the stated aim of the whole UN climate process. Indeed, they might easily allow a 4C rise. Yet with many governments distracted by pressing economic worries, the deal was as much as could have been expected; perhaps a little more. Its core is a quid pro quo between the European Union and big developing-country polluters, especially China and India. For its part, the EU will undertake a second round of emissions abatement under the existing UN arrangement, the Kyoto protocol, after that protocol's main provisions expire at the end of 2012. This will prolong the life of a treaty that imposes no emissions-cutting burden on any developing country. In return, countries both rich and poor have agreed to negotiate a new regime by 2015, and to bring it into effect by 2020. Crucially, this will require sacrifices by poor counties as well as rich ones. The deal, which was reached despite last-ditch resistance from China and India, and despite little enthusiasm for it from America, promises to break a divisive and anachronistic distinction between developed countries and developing ones (which are deemed to include places like South Korea and Saudi Arabia as well as China and India). Since developing countries as defined by Kyoto are now responsible for 58% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, their exemption has both poisoned the waters of the UN process and rendered it ineffective. The developing-country polluters, however, were not a pushover. The Indians held out for 36 hours after the summit was supposed to have ended, even when most other elements of a deal were in place. Their particular objection was to the insistence of the EU and its allies that the successor to Kyoto must be legally binding on all parties. With the prospect of no deal looming, the European and Indian delegations were urged to go into a huddle in the middle of the conference hall and work out a compromise. It was the Brazilians, though, who came up with the necessary weasel words. The new deal is not to be legally binding. It will, instead, be a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force. What that may mean is anyone's guesswhich is the whole point. The Kyoto protocol actually is legally binding, but it contains no provisions to enforce penalties against those who fail to do what they agreed to. This has allowed Canada, for example, to miss its target, massively, with impunity. (Indeed, shortly after the meeting ended Peter Kent, Canada's environment minister, said his country now planned to pull out of Kyoto altogether.) Unless penalties for failure are inserted into the successor protocol, or instrument, or outcomewhich China and India would almost certainly not allowit is hard to imagine how it would have greater force. The agreement was, nevertheless, sufficient for the EU to claim success. A more important matter is the scale of the putative future regime's ambition to curb global warming. The Durban agreement includes an acknowledgment that there is a widening gap between the mitigation efforts currently promised and those needed to keep warming within the broadly recognised 2C safety limit. It remains to be seen whether this will spur the signatories to take the costly actions that closing this gap would require. The Kyoto-era precedents are not good. Agreement was also reached on a range of other climate-friendly measures. The most notable of these was the broad design of a global Green Climate Fund. This will funnel some of the $100 billion a year that rich countries have promised to make available to poor ones by 2020, to help them cut emissions and adapt to climate change. There was, however, little discussion on the question of exactly where the promised money would be found. A cynic might reflect that all this signals how toothless the UN process has become. Yet the Europeans' efforts were appreciated by many poor countries, particularly African ones and some small island nations which feel their very existence is threatened by global warming. The support these places gave to the EU's proposals made it harder for the Indians and Chinese to decry them as a developed-world plot against the poor and helpless. The rich are different The Indians do, however, have legitimate cause for worry. They fear the imposition of costs they can ill afford, and which will constrain their country's ability to grow and thereby lift millions out of poverty. China, the world's biggest polluter in total, whose average emissions per head are already higher than those of some European countries, will worry less. It seems resigned to having to undertake more stringent emissions-cutting. Indeed, its recent heavy investment in renewable energy and energy-efficiency schemes suggests it sees profit in this. America, by contrast, has reason to be glad of the outcome, in theory. It has long bewailed the asymmetry between rich and poor that is written into the Kyoto protocol. This was the ostensible reason why it failed to ratify it. Yet it was apparent in Durban that the American negotiators had little enthusiasm for almost any part of the international process. Their objections to some parts of the dealthough roundly denouncedwere in fact perfectly reasonable. They are worried, for example, that the proposed global fund will be run by the UN, a recipe in many people's eyes for inefficiency and sloth. The Americans would like it to be controlled by an independent body, in the way the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is. It is a shame they could not get their way. And yet, that the world's most powerful countrywhose researchers have made a vast contribution to climate sciencewas reduced to a bit-part in negotiations over the climate's future was unfortunate, both for the world and for America. Next time the Americans demand China, India or Brazil take bold steps for the global good, on trade or security, that recalcitrance will no doubt be remembered.