G8 fails to set climate world alight

ANALYSIS By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News website

G8 leaders believe they have planted the seeds of climate success

At first sight, the G8 agreement on climate change promises much.

Leaders are "committed to avoiding the most serious consequences of climate change", and determined to stabilise greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at levels that would avoid "dangerous climate change".

In fact, this is exactly what leaders of nearly 200 countries signed up to in the original UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), agreed at the 1992 Earth Summit. So if re-stating a 16-year-old commitment is progress, then this is clearly a success.

The question ever since Rio has been what to do about it. But the reality of negotiations within groups such as the G8 is that every party needs to emerge with bits of language that they can point to and say "I won".

So here is the key sentence in all its diplomatic finery: "We seek to share with all parties to the UNFCCC the vision of, and together with them to consider and adopt in the UNFCCC negotiations, the goal of achieving at least 50% reduction of global emissions by 2050, recognising that this global challenge can only be met by a global response, in particular, by the contributions from all major economies, consistent with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities."

The G8 are crawling forward on emissions cuts at a time when giant leaps and bounds are needed Peter Grant, Tearfund

So the EU emerges with an apparent commitment to cut emissions by at least 50%.

The US and Canadian administrations can say that it is only a commitment if the major developing countries play ball, and that the 50% figure concerns global emissions, not necessarily their own.

And the major developing countries, involved on the sidelines of the G8 summit, can point to inclusion of the UNFCCC phrase "common but differentiated responsibilities" as continued acknowledgement that far less would be required of them than of developed economies.

Off base

The host nation Japan appears to have won two key concessions.

One is that different industrial sectors could be set different targets with the aim of preserving competitiveness.

The second, which is more important, concerns the baseline year against which carbon savings would be measured.

With very few exceptions, the UN process has always used 1990 as the baseline.

But Japan argues this is unfair. The significant gains in energy efficiency it made before 1990 are effectively penalised, it says, while the gains made in Europe after 1990 through the clean-up of Soviet-era industry and the switch to natural gas are rewarded.

Campaigners say the G8 has shown far less ambition than is needed

The G8 document does not specify a baseline year, but asked by reporters, Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda said it was "current levels".

This would be significant in at least three ways.

From a practical standpoint, emissions have risen by more than a quarter since 1990; so a 50% cut from now is worth far less than a 50% cut from 1990 levels.

On the diplomatic front, it would raise a big question for the EU, which has taken 1990 as the baseline for its own target of cutting emissions by 20% by 2020. The UK's domestic targets also use 1990.

And from a philosophical point of view, it would again amount to turning the clock back 16 years, and saying "we're going to ignore what we said then and start again from here".

The EU will continue to insist that 1990 stays as the baseline in UN talks; and as the G8 document does not specify any date, any party can select whatever it feels is more politically acceptable when reporting back to its electorate.

But just by raising the issue, Mr Fukuda has thrown up yet another thing for parties to argue about.

Leadership question

So it is perhaps not surprising that campaign groups have lined up to criticise the deal.

WWF said it confirmed the recent trend of industrialised countries showing less, rather than more, of the leadership required.

"The G8 are responsible for 62% of the carbon dioxide accumulated in the Earth's atmosphere, which makes them the main culprit of climate change and the biggest part of the problem", said the director of the group's global climate initiative, Kim Carstensen.

"WWF finds it pathetic that they still duck their historic responsibility, and refuse to turn from the main driver of the problem into the main driver of the solution."

Tearfund, which campaigns on issues of developing world poverty rather than the environment per se, added that using a 1990 baseline was crucial.

"Concrete commitments on climate change are the acid test of success at this summit," said international director Peter Grant.

"The G8 are crawling forward on emissions cuts at a time when giant leaps and bounds are needed."

The G8 acknowledged that the coal industry needs to be cleaner

The other main gripe of these organisations is that 2050 is too distant. They have been urging parties to commit to shorter timescales for achieving cuts, as the EU has done with its own 2020 target, arguing that this removes the option of delaying action until it is too late.

Instead, the statement merely acknowledges that "a long-term global goal will require mid-term goals and national plans to achieve them" - without specifying what these goals should look like.

Elsewhere, there is acknowledgement that the poorest countries are going to need help to adapt to climate impacts, and that clean energy technologies need to be developed and rolled out rapidly.

There is support for the rapid development of "clean coal" demonstration plants, in particular, and recognition that some countries will seek to lower carbon emissions through investing in nuclear.

Place in the world

It is important to recognise what the G8 could not achieve.

The UNFCCC is the sovereign body for making global agreements, and the two-year road leading from last December's UN climate summit in Bali to next year's in Copenhagen is still the most important route to a low-carbon future.

Nothing that the G8 or G8+5 or G20 or any other expansion of the core group could agree would change that.

What this week's gathering could have done was to point the way and ease the path, by agreeing a common front to take into the UN process.

On Wednesday, G8 countries meet the large group of "big emitters" or "major economies", the latest stage in a process formulated by the Bush administration.

The group includes major developing countries such as China, India and Mexico. And they have already set out their stall, responding to the G8 declaration with a statement calling on rich countries to go further and faster, committing to cuts of 25-40% by 2020 and 80-90% by 2050.

So far, then, this G8 summit has confused the issue rather than clarifying it.

Governments are as divided as ever on what they are prepared to pledge and what they want to achieve; and re-opening the baseline year question is potentially hugely destructive.

Richard.Black-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

From Kyoto to Bali

The UN negotiations later this year need to build on the last 15 years of international climate talks. So how do we get a good outcome?

Tony Juniper

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May 15, 2007 1:00 PM

The most important contribution that Tony Blair has made to environmental politics during this time in office has to been to propel the climate change issue into international arenas. He started this ball rolling in earnest with a September 2004 speech that signalled his intention to use the UK presidencies of the G8 and EU for this purpose. In both cases, some progress has indeed been made. This is good news, because to stand a reasonable chance of avoiding temperature increases of more than 2C (4F), then emissions need to peak and then quickly fall in under a decade.

Earlier this year, the EU heads of state signed up to an emissions reduction target of 20% by 2020. Friends of the Earth argued that to be in line with its commitment to play its part in preventing temperature increases of more than 2C that this target should have been at least 30%, and indeed the leaders said that if other countries would step up to the challenge, that the EU would be prepared to go that far. In terms of what the other big polluting countries will now do, there are two meetings this year that will in large part signal what is possible by when. The first is the G8 meeting in Germany in June and the other is the Bali UN climate change negotiations in December.

The G8 process was a calculated political move by Blair to create a "safe" discussion forum for the Americans and some of the big polluter developing countries (especially China and India). These and other nations have been terrified (for differing reasons) that they might be pressured in a formal UN process into taking on binding targets. Blair's idea was to get them talking in an informal setting where binding commitments were not on the table. This is in large part why the G8 discussions, kicked off before Gleneagles in 2005, have been so concerned with technology and trading schemes, rather than targets and timetables. Although we will ultimately need a formal agreement that sets out who is going to do what, I think this is OK, up to a point.

The G8 process has, for example, helped to inch George Bush a little further forward on the climate change question, accepting that it is happening (grudgingly) and getting words agreed about the role of technology. Having said this, the main force in moving Bush has undoubtedly been the dramatic shift in the US public opinion that has taken place in the last couple of years. From state and city leaders to the heads of corporations and from the Christian right to scientific institutions, the US establishment has moved and left the Bush administration isolated.

The president has clung to his old scepticism, however, resolutely refusing to admit an urgent challenge or the need for a coordinated global response. And that remains the case. Moving the Whitehouse to the next stage must not only involve diplomacy but also a hardening of the mood back home in the US, which is happening and which is a cause for optimism. Blair and others need to recognise this political dynamic and to build on it, not only talking with the president, but reaching out to the vast range of other US opinion formers who are fast changing the political landscape there.

Even if Bush does signal some acceptance of the science, however, it is still a big leap from there to getting multilateral agreement on targets and timetables. And this is the real danger. If Blair sees his main job as getting Bush to acknowledge the problem, then the urgent need to get a legally binding deal in the UN might, in a diplomatic and political sense, be neglected. There have been signs of this for some time. For example Tony Blair has repeatedly signalled that he sees a future Kyoto-style agreement as unachievable (definitely a US-centric view) and has suggested that something else might work better. This kind of talk is unhelpful, especially since the most important UN negotiations on climate change since the Kyoto accord in 1997 are set to take place after the G8, later this year in Bali. That meeting needs to agree legally binding targets and timetables, as well as voluntary action from some of the big developing countries' emitters, backed with assistance from the developed countries.

Getting a deal in Bali must be seen as the real prize. Certainly the G8 can be an important milestone, but the political strategy needs to see Bali as the main opportunity. If there is to be any real chance of staying below two degrees of warming, then Bali must build on the last 15 years of international climate talks, and all the finely honed nuances contained in the Kyoto mechanisms, to set out a new future deal. Of course Kyoto is flawed, but it is the best we have and it will not be replaced by a more effective agreement coming out of the G8 talks.

So how do we get a good outcome at the UN? Well the G8 can certainly contribute by underlining how the latest science dictates the need for a global response underpinned by clear formal rules. The EU can do its bit as well, by putting in place the measures to meet its own Kyoto targets, and then moving toward the more ambitious 20% recently agreed to. This needs to be done by the EU as a whole and by individual governments as well. The UK is in a good position to take a lead.

Earlier this year, Friends of the Earth's Big Ask campaign succeeded in persuading the British government of the need for a domestic legal framework to manage scientifically determined cuts in emissions. A draft climate change bill was published in March and is now being consulted on. It has widespread support across the political spectrum, from business and a whole host of civil society groups. If this bill is made strong, with legally binding annual emissions reduction targets, if it includes a scientifically determined 2050 reduction target (of at least 80%) and if it includes international shipping and aviation, then it will be a genuine source of leadership and will undoubtedly lend credibility to British efforts to secure a global deal.

To move forward on climate change, the world will still need individual leaders to show the way, however. When Tony Blair steps down, who will take up the torch to light up the climate change issue on the global political stage? Angela Merkel is one contender. Perhaps too is Gordon Brown, although he has shown relatively little interest in the issue, certainly compared to his work on poverty alleviation. But he could do it, if he wanted to, not least on the back of domestic leadership coming from a good bill turning into a strong act of parliament, and thus gaining what Tony Blair has sometimes lacked: the credibility that comes from taking decisive action yourself.

Whoever seeks to fill Blair's boots on this subject will perhaps have the most important political legacy in all of human history, for whoever can broker the breakthroughs needed on climate change has the opportunity to save human civilisation. I think that is a legacy worth having.