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Where are we? Perspective on where we stand on climate change…

The latest round of United Nations climate negotiations recently concluded – this time the meetings were held in Poznan, Poland in December, 2008 – and unfortunately, the results were less than conclusive. Wilderness protection – including non-forested areas such as wetlands or areas with carbon rich soils – can and should be a major component of any global response to climate change, but we will have to wait a little longer to see whether this critical message is being heard.

If you tend to view the glass as half empty, there are plenty of reasons to view these talks as a disappointment. First, current negotiations may be aiming at the wrong stabilization levels for carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Until now, keeping carbon dioxide levels at 450 parts per million to limit a temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels has been the consensus objective. But a number of delegates in Poznan (including Al Gore) argued that 450 ppm is too high, and that the target, as noted by NASA scientist James Hansen, should really be 350 ppm. Complicating matters further, the Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, noted that a rise of 2 degrees Celsius might itself be too much, leading to serious environmental impacts.

Nor was there any agreement reached on how much developed countries would need to reduce emissions below 1990 levels to achieve a 450 ppm – not to mention a 350 ppm – target. Negotiating these emissions reductions will now have to wait until the meetings in Copenhagen at the end of 2009, when the U.S. will be expected to play a leading role in the negotiations. Of course, even with all the good will of the new Obama administration, whatever his administration negotiates will have to pass muster with the United States Senate (and do so with a two thirds majority), and the Senate may well be reluctant to ratify any new climate agreement that doesn’t include binding reductions from developing countries such as Brazil, India and China. So while negotiators pledged to switch to “full negotiating mode” in 2009, some participants are already questioning whether Copenhagen will yield the necessary results.

Little progress was made on the role of nature conservation in a future climate agreement. Discussions on the carbon benefits of avoiding deforestation – often referred to as Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation or “REDD” -remained at the level of a Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technical Advice within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and have yet to be elevated to the UNFCCC’s Ad Hoc Working Group on Long Term Cooperative Action, where decisions on policy mechanism can begin to be made. A well designed REDD mechanism, which focuses on all carbon rich natural environments including but not limited to forests, could have enormous implications on the planet’s wilderness and biodiversity in addition to a range of social and climate benefits. The fact that these discussions have not yet moved to a higher level is very disappointing.

Finally, the announcement of an Adaptation Fund to help developing countries adapt to climate change was nothing new: the fund has been in place for some time, but legal problems, which have now been resolved, were preventing its full operationalization. In any case, the fund only represents a small fraction of the financial assistance necessary to help countries adapt to climate change impacts.

At the same time, if you view the glass half full, you can certainly argue that this meeting could not have produced much without the presence of the Obama administration’s negotiating team, and in the middle of a serious economic downturn: the pledge to move negotiations into high gear and to start producing actual negotiating text by March is about as much as could be hoped for. And a number of countries did chose to announce unilateral emission reductions target, including Mexico which pledged to reduce emissions by half by 2050, and Brazil, which promised an enormous reduction of 70% by 2020. The EU promised 20% below 1990 levels by 2020, and agreed to go to 30% if a global agreement on this target could be achieved. The EU, India, China, and Brazil also announced support for 25-40% reductions below 1990 levels for developed countries. Finally, there also seems to be a consensus that conservation has a key role to play in any global climate solution, even though the devil is in the details regarding how to set up an equitable and effective mechanism for maximizing the role of forest protection.

We will have to wait for the next round of meetings to see whether negotiations have indeed entered a new, more urgent phase. In the meantime, our carbon dioxide emissions continue to increase, we may be aiming at the wrong target, and our climate and our wilderness hangs in the balance.

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