No noises ahead of Cancun

Around this time last year, there was frenetic activity in the climate change circuits in the lead up to the widely anticipated summit meeting in Copenhagen, even though it had become sufficiently clear that a comprehensive and global agreement — that was the stated objective of the conference — was not going to be realised in the Danish capital. Negotiators around the world were regularly huddling together in meetings, working hard to draw the contours of an honourable deal, nations had begun making those big announcements that, they hoped, would be taken as evidence of their willingness to walk the extra mile, and even school children were discussing what a necessary outcome from Copenhagen should be.

This year has been in stark contrast. With just three months to go for the next annual climate conference — this time scheduled at the Mexican beach city of Cancun in November-December — there has been absolutely no excitement, and very little activity. It is almost as if the climate negotiations came to an end with the failure of the Copenhagen conference.

Negotiators have been going through the motions and almost as many meetings have been organised since January as last year. The latest one, involving environment ministers from more than 40 countries, came to an end in Switzerland over the last weekend. But as has been the case with every other meeting this year, there has been absolutely no progress made at any of these discussions.

This despite the fact that the climate negotiations are now limited mainly around the very modest expectations for Cancun. By all accounts, Cancun would be considered a big success if it delivered on an agreed financial architecture that would ensure that the least developed countries and countries most threatened by climate change were assured of ample money from the developed and rich countries to deal with the effects of climate change. (Forget about a legally-binding comprehensive climate treaty, or even emission reduction targets for the rich countries for a period beyond 2013 when the current commitments under Kyoto Protocol come to an end). In Copenhagen, the rich countries had agreed to create two kinds of funds — a fast-start fund of US $30 billion over the period 2010-12 and long-term ‘Green Fund’ that will make available US $100 billion every year from 2020.

There has been little progress on either of these with no clarity on who was contributing how much and who was benefitting. A page showing the list of recipient countries on a newly created website on the fast-start funding is quite revealing: the column against each of the listed countries is vacant, meaning no amount has till now been pledged to any of them. The page on donor countries shows a total commitment of just over US$ 3 billion, or about 30 per cent of the funds that are supposed to be delivered, not just promised, by the end of this year. (Curiously, India’s name figures in the list of recipients, even though New Delhi has made it clear that it is not in contention for receiving these funds, which, it has stressed, must be given to the most needy countries.)

In the absence of any real action towards the global agreement — which even the most optimistic don’t see coming until the 2011 climate change conference in South Africa — climate negotiation this year has been all about smaller groups of countries, having similar interests and stakes, binding together more strongly, and agreeing to cooperate within themselves rather spend much energy in bigger talks. Accordingly, India has had several round of formal and informal discussions with other members of the so-called BASIC countries (Brazil, South Africa, India and China), the EU countries have met many times within themselves while the Latin American countries are slowly organising themselves into a formidable grouping.

Many believe that the low level of expectation from the Cancun conference was actually a good thing — a blessing in disguise that promised a better chance of delivering something substantial. They are of the opinion that one of the biggest reason for the failure of Copenhagen was that it had aimed at too ambitious a target without finalising the finer details. In effect, Cancun is trying to follow an inverted approach. Aiming for the smaller agreements, which, hopefully over time, could be bound together in the form of a comprehensive and global agreement on climate change, that many believe, is still possible.