Is the Lima Deal a Travesty of Global Climate Justice?

THE GUARDIAN – Dec. 15, 2014
Poorer countries likely to reject agreement in Paris next year if onus falls on them rather than those largely responsible for global warming
By John Vidal
At one point on Saturday night it looked quite likely that the Lima climate talks would collapse in disarray. Instead of the harmony expected between China and the US following their pre-talks pact, the world’s two largest economies were squaring off; workmen were dismantling the venue; old faultlines between rich and poor countries were opening up again and some countries’ delegations were rushing to catch their planes.
Countries may technically still be on track to negotiate a final agreement in Paris next year, but the gaps between them are growing rather than closing and the stakes are getting higher every month.
In the end, after a marathon 32-hour session where everyone stared into the abyss of total failure, a modicum of compromise prevailed. Some deft changes of emphasis in the revised text and the inclusion of key words such as “loss” and “damage” proved just enough for diplomats to bodge a last-minute compromise. There were cheers and tears as the most modest of agreements was reached. The Peruvian president of the UN climate change convention, or COP20, could say without irony: “With this text, we all win without exception.”
Not so. Countries may technically still be on track to negotiate a final agreement in Paris next year, but the gaps between them are growing rather than closing and the stakes are getting higher every month.
We have now reached the point where everyone can see clearly that whatever ambition there once was to respect science and try to hold temperatures to an overall 2C rise has been ditched. We also know that developing countries will not get anything like the money they need to adapt their economies and infrastructure to climate change and that those countries that have been historically responsible for getting the world into its current climate mess will be able to do much what they like.
As it stands, 21 years of tortuous negotiations may have actually taken developing countries backwards on tackling climate change. From an imperfect but legally binding UN treaty struck in 1992, in which industrialized countries accepted responsibility and agreed to make modest but specific cuts over a defined period, we now have the prospect of a less than legally binding global deal where everyone is obliged to do something but where the poor may have to do the most and the rich will be free to do little.
In 1992, rich countries were obliged to lead and to help the poor, but we now have a situation where those who had little or no historical responsibility for climate change are likely to cut emissions the most.
This travesty of global climate justice, say many developing countries, is largely the fault of the US, which, backed by Britain and others industrialized countries like Canada and Australia, has helped build up distrust in developing countries by continually trying to deregulate the international climate change regime by weakening the rules, shifting responsibility to the south and making derisory offers of financial help.
The US secretary of state, John Kerry, made an impassioned speech in Lima warning that the world was “on a course leading to tragedy”, but inside the conference halls the US negotiators were not giving an inch during the negotiations, and the emissions cuts that the US proposed would put the world on a path for a global temperature increase well beyond the already dangerous 2C.
Countries now have little time to resolve fundamental issues, and success in Paris is not at all certain. All countries will be asked to submit their plans for curbing greenhouse gas emissions, known as intended nationally determined contributions, to the UN by 31 March. The UN will then crunch the figures and a few weeks before the talks open we will know just how far away countries are to limiting temperature increase to below 1.5C or 2C.
As it stands, we may be on track for 4C of warming. But with more than 100 countries supporting the ambitious goal of phasing out all man-made carbon emissions by 2050, Paris will see a massive showdown.
From now on, the stakes only get higher. Led by China, Africa and the least developed countries see weak and unjust climate targets from rich industrialized countries and, over the next year, they will exert as much pressure as they can to establish a fair and equitable way to share out what is left of the global carbon budget. But as Lima showed, they are now working together and are unlikely to sign up to what they think is a meaningless deal.
The other problem ducked in Lima was finance. Developing nations wanted rich countries to set a clear timetable to scale up the funds available to help them adapt. But the final text merely “requested” that rich countries “enhance the available quantitative and qualitative elements of a pathway” towards 2020.
Because the industrialized countries have already promised to secure $100bn a year after 2020, developing countries will want cast-iron assurances about how this will be achieved. Given that rich countries have so far pledged only about $10bn to run over the next five years, the gap may be too great and the likelihood of failure in Paris is high.
Unless the rich countries take care in the negotiations, at some point it will become clear to developing countries that no deal may prove better than any deal.
The Guardian
The Guardian UK, one of Britain’s top daily newspapers, provides coverage of international environmental issues. Earth Island Journal is a member of the Guardian’s Environment News Network.

People’s Summit in Lima Envisions Bottom-Up Movement for Global Climate Justice

Common Dreams, Dec. 9, 2014
Alternative gathering outside of UN talks brings together civil societies and social movements from across the globe
By Sarah Lazare, staff writer
Social movements and civil societies from around the world are gathered in Lima, Peru this week with an ambitiousgoal: to “develop an alternative form of development, one that respects the limits and regenerative capacities of Mother Earth and tackles the structural causes of climate change.”
The “People’s Summit on Climate Change” is hosted by grassroots organizations and networks — including the Workers General Confederation of Peru, Andean Coordinator of Indigenous organizations, and Workers Autonomous Central of Peru.
It constitutes an alternative to the ongoing United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, also in Lima, where government representatives and corporate leaders are holding the latest in a series of UN talks.
“We, the social movements and the progressive forces of civil society are beginning to seriously prepare ourselves for the protracted struggle to defend the people and the planet and create a just transition from the extractive and exploitative economy to a democratic economy that aligns us with the natural processes of the earth,” Kali Akuno, from the Mississippi-based organization Cooperation Jackson, told Common Dreams from Lima.
“A framework of global expropriation”
According to Akuno, who is attending the alternative summit as part of a Grassroots Global Justice Alliance delegation of U.S. communities on the front-lines of climate change, what is happening within the UN meeting is cynical: “At this moment the states and the transnational corporations are refining a framework of global expropriation that will complete the capitalist consumption of the earth. And they have become so bold as to remove any mention of human rights and protections from the framework.”
The UN conference in Lima, which takes place from December 1-12, is being publicly billed as a gathering to create a draft document that will “lay the foundation for an effective, new, universal climate change agreement in Paris in 2015.” The Paris meeting, known as COP21, “will mark a decisive stage in negotiations on the future international agreement on a post-2020 regime, and will, as agreed in Durban, adopt the major outlines of that regime,” according to a statement from the French government.
Akuno is not alone in being disillusioned with the UN process. Critics charge that the Lima meeting, in keeping with past UN talks, has been hijacked by corporations and the interests of wealthy people and nations, and as a result, will fail to deliver the urgent action needed.
Representatives from the fossil fuel industry have been holding private meetings with numerous national delegations, including a closed-door meeting between the Canadian delegation and Chevron and TransCanada, according to a report from Leehi Yona and Diego Arguedas Ortiz in Inter Press Service.
On Monday, activists, including indigenous communities in Colombia, Peru, Canada, and beyond, shut down a panel at the Conference. The panel — originally titled, “Why Divest from Fossil Fuels When a Future with Low Emission Fossil Energy Use is Already a Reality?”—which was organized by fossil fuel industry lobbyists and featured speakers from the World Coal Association and Shell.
However, People’s Summit organizers say the UN conference presents an opening to civil society and social movement groups to set their own vision for global change heading into the Paris meeting.
As world leaders draft a new climate agreement, those gathered at the alternative summit will “share initiatives, proposals and experiences, as well as define and coordinate our agendas, to bring pressure to bear on the decision makers at COP20, and demand that the official negotiators take account of the world’s citizens and peoples,” according to organizers.
Rally in Lima, Peru, in support of Maxima Acuña de Chaupe, an Indigenous woman from Peru being prosecuted for trying to keep her land. (Photo: Grassroots Global Justice Alliance)
“People from social movements around the world”
“It’s incredible to see so many people from social movements around the world coming together at this People’s Summit on Climate Change,” Cindy Wiesner, National Coordinator for Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, toldCommon Dreams.
“There are mass movement organizations like La Vía Campesina, broad labor unions like the CUT-Peru (Confederation of Workers of Peru), global feminist movements like the World March of Women, indigenous alliances like Andean Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations (CAOI) and Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), all putting our heads together in Lima to align our community-led solutions to this climate crisis,” Wiesner added.
The summit, which takes place from December 8 to 11, is “split into five tracks which all address a piece of climate change from food to rights of Mother Earth to alternative energy and economies,” Diana Lopez of the Southwest Workers Union in San Antonio, Texas told Common Dreams. “A large percent of the participants are indigenous people from the region. Many understand and speak Spanish but it is not their native language.”
Lopez shared reflections on the opening day of the gathering:
On one level you have global funders making spaces for their grantees to speak about their work. On another there are more academic, technology and policy spaces. And finally there are the organizer spaces which are self-organized and are concentrated on front-line experience, movement-building and alignment around solutions.
People seem tired and frustrated talking about policy and what the government should be doing. They don’t want to talk about those things anymore, and while it’s important to know them and keep track of those policies that will ultimately affect our communities the most, people are passionate about shifting towards a systemic change framework. The pueblos are interested in learning how to integrate new sustainable technology into traditional farming practices while still healing Mother Earth. We are talking about fighting against the extreme corporations that continue to destroy communities while developing an alternative space where our people can thrive and begin the healing of Pachamama.
The message is clear that in order to really create solutions to climate change we must also talk about the disparities among funding, patriarchy within our own movement and the role U.S. plays in the destruction of communities.
The Summit is building towards a December 10th “People’s Climate March” through Lima, timed to coincide with the International Day of Human Rights, which marks the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
An announcement for the march declares, “[W]e invite you to come and defend YOUR rights, OUR rights and those of LIFE on Earth.”