The impacts and extent of climate change is subtle and effects unevenly distributed, a degree for one country such as the UK or the US may not be an existential crisis but for people living in small island developing states (SIDS) is certainly is. These states, drawn from all oceans and regions of the world: Africa, Caribbean, Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, Pacific and South China Sea make up 5% of the world’s population and a great proportion of the worlds cultural diversity. It’s no secret that these states are the most vulnerable to climate change but for these countries the numbers that are negotiated literally in no uncertain terms mean the life of death of their homeland, and their culture. At Copenhagen some of the most moving and courageous speeches were made by these states and I would urge you to take a look at the following two speeches by Tuvalu and The Maldives who have fought the corner for the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) for a long time.

These are some of the issues such states have to deal with:

• Sea level rise: many islands are only a few meters above sea level with precious little fresh water. Coasts are only able to adapt so slow levels of sea level change.
• Many islands are made exclusively of coral reefs on top of old sea mountains (Atolls). These islands rely on coral reefs for food (Fish) and protection from erosion. When corals are physically stressed they kick out the algae that feed them and die. This is known as bleaching and happens when they are too hot, or don’t get enough light. In addition corals skeletons rely on how acidic the oceans are. Changes in the oceans from increased CO2 in the atmosphere may stop skeletons of corals growing or even cause them to dissolve.
• Many islands in the Caribbean the Indian and the Pacific Ocean lie in tropical storm track (hurricanes = Atlantic, typhoons = Indian, cyclones = Pacific). These storms cause great damage and loss of life, for example in Haiti last year.

For them numbers matter in a big way, the two big ones being 350ppm CO2 equivalent in the atmosphere and 1.5°C. Today I was lucky enough to attend a very interesting side event (A meeting about a topic not directly involved in the UNFCCC talks) by the prestigious Potsdam Institute for climate change. The event was focused on the 1.5°C limit which is largely thought of as the survival limit for small island states as well as for the livelihoods for low-lying deltaic countries such as Bangladesh. This event was amazing because it summarised the latest published and yet to be published research on the feasibility of a 1.5°C limit (i.e. what we can and cannot emit), the economic cost of achieving this world, the impacts of not doing so as well as the current direction of negotiations. Literally a commentary on the future of the home for over 0.3 billion people held in a room with less than 25 people present, mostly NGO representatives and a few members from delegations.

Here’s the gist of what I heard.

Currently the Copenhagen Accord fails to come close to the 50% chance of achieving the 2°C target agreed in the document (see previous post). It’s hard to see how this will get better if a bottom up approach to emissions reductions (countries set their own targets) is adopted in the long-term as advocated by the USA and other Annex I (developed) countries.

The Potsdam Institute has been working on global emissions pathways that would enable small islands to survive, they call these the 1.5°C/350 scenario and the Star Wars-like ICP-3pD scenario (soon to be published in the Energy Journal). The first will peak at 1.5°C with 350ppm in the atmosphere some time after 2100. The second is slightly higher, in the 400′s. What they found is that the only way these are possible is using negative emissions. That’s right, actually sucking CO2 from the air before the end of the century. This may sound silly but its possible if we burn plant material then place it underground using CCS (see this free paper for more detail) and its thought this will be technically possible, think I-phone technology curve or jet engines. Another example is the rapid development and spread of the wind industry by the Danish Government, current world leader in the sector. In fact they did the maths and found that these carbon negative scenarios would cost economies roughly 1-2 years growth in 100 years. Less than the occasional banking crisis! However for this to be possible emissions must peak before 2020 and then fall on average 3-4% per year, still perfectly doable you would think.

However, no matter how many times AOSIS puts 350ppm or 1.5°C into the negotiating text, developed countries remove them using the argument that they are unfeasible or impossible or too costly (Ahem… Johnathan Pershing of the USA). Now this is where it gets interesting, who’s doing their modeling? Well their own research institutions of course (Stanford). Today we were told otherwise by top scientists and economists, we were also told that in fact the models quoted by the US government were designed not to be able to incorporate negative emissions, i.e. the model limits make it physically impossible to evaluate 1.5°C. That’s not the same as 1.5°C being physically impossible or too expensive as the US and company like to claim. Maybe they are just naive, however I think not, this is a clear example of the battle over scientific information affecting the negotiations. In other words who’s scientific advice is better? Academic Imperialism might be another description. In our interviews for FIG so far we have already heard about the lack of research institutions in developing countries being a problem. It seems here that science and the results of research institutions are being exploited in a partisan way, which although hardly unexpected is rather sinister considering that it is being used to justify the wiping of so many peoples livelihoods from the earth. Here is another rather glaring information gap, an inequality in scientific advice and for that matter scientific institutions. It’s important that this counter message gets out, it can be done and it is affordable but only if we act now with global emissions peaking before 2020. 1.5°c and 350ppm are the only desirable targets with the added benefit that the European 2°C target would then have a 95% probablility of being met.

Here’s the possible future for SIDS without it:

2C: Corals may no longer grow. Hurricane numbers drop but strength increases. El Nino increases and so does the economic ruin it causes.  Sea level rises of 2-5m by 2300, 1m by 2100. Changes is ecosystems etc etc.

You get the picture.

When you are here and you speak to individuals, the sometimes inaccessible, unemotive numbers suddenly have gravity. They can make you heart heavy and your stomach drop. Today upon asking a female delegate from Micronesia how she felt she replied in a horribly resigned manner “I think we are pretty screwed” the sad thing is that about sums up the situation. Academic inequality (the knowledge gap) is taking 1.5C off the negotiating table and it’s just not on.

Sam writes for UNfair Play a collection of climate campaigners who volunteer for the most vulnerable and under-represented nations at UNFCCC conferences. Read more about their experiences at UNfairPlay.info.

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I was in Copenhagen for the duration of the UN climate talks as part of the UK Youth Delegation (you can see my earlier coverage of the conference on the UKYD blog, here). It was a non-stop, sleep-deprived, and confusing fortnight, with many twists and turns as events unfolded. The first week began with a leaked draft text that appeared to kill off the Kyoto Protocol and penalise developing nations unfairly; to which the G77 bloc of developing nations responded with their own draft text, which was also leaked. Matters escalated with impassioned speeches, walk-outs, and repeated instances of the talks breaking down. As world leaders arrived in their droves and debate reached a crescendo, the possibility of the talks collapsing entirely suddenly became very real – a possibility which only receded with some last-minute interventions.

All of which made for exciting viewing, and some excitable journalism. But it became harder and harder over the two weeks to see what was really going on at the talks; to discern beneath the daily froth the deeper currents of power politics. In particular, the final days of the conference – when the Copenhagen Accord was thrashed out behind closed doors with few NGO observers allowed in – is proving difficult to piece together. Who was truly privy to the writing of the Accord? Who compromised, and on what? Who was responsible for gutting it of its crucial commitments? In short, whodunnit?

It seems that everyone, whether politician seeking exoneration or pundit reaching for explanation, has a different story. President Obama got the chance to shape immediate impressions of the deal through dint of a press conference which circumvented the UN negotiations (meaning that some delegates heard about the Accord through BBC news first, rather than in plenary). Despite this, he did not seem overly keen to spin the deal his way – claiming it to be a “meaningful and historic”, but acknowledging that it would not be enough. The head of the Chinese delegation, Xie Zhenhua, issued a more propagandist statement – “The meeting has had a positive result, everyone should be happy” (which reminded me of Margaret Thatcher’s injunction to journalists asking about the Falklands War: “Simply rejoice!”).

Meanwhile, the Times, somewhat bizarrely, decided to pin the failure of Copenhagen in part on small island states (“Any process that makes a star of the teams from Tuvalu and the Maldives is bound to balk progress”). Western NGOs, on the other hand, had no doubts that the developed nations were the key culprits; Greenpeace International’s website, for example, argued that “the blame for failure mostly lies with the rich industrialised world… in particular, the US failed to take any real leadership and dragged the talks down.” Youth, too, blamed Obama; after all, it was in him whom many young people, myself included, had vested such hopes for a successful treaty at Copenhagen. At a demonstration I attended the night the deal was announced, many young protesters carried pictures of the President with the words ‘Climate Shame’ pinned to them, and chanted anti-Obama slogans.

But as the conference ended and recriminations began to fly, different stories emerged. Upon returning to the UK, Ed Miliband and Gordon Brown both issued surprisingly undiplomatic statements criticizing a small group of outspoken developing countries (identified in private as Sudan, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Cuba) for refusing to sign the Accord, thereby causing the UN to merely ‘note’ it rather than adopt it. More significantly, they blamed China for weakening the provisions in the Accord: removing the crucial emissions targets for the world to cut 50% of its emissions, and industrialised nations 80%, by 2050. At first this seemed to me to be just too convenient. Surely this was just another case of blame-China-syndrome, akin to the frequently-repeated factoid that since China builds two coal plants a week, there’s little use us Brits doing anything.

But then other reports began to corroborate their account of events. John Vidal, usually highly sympathetic in his coverage of developing countries wrote in the Guardian that the Chinese delegation had been instrumental in removing emissions targets from the final Accord (” China doesn’t like numbers”).  Then environmental writer Mark Lynas, who had observed events first-hand as part of the Maldives’ delegation, pointed his finger squarely at China, claiming it had forced the removal of both 2050 emissions targets (a 50% cut for the world, an 80% cut for developed nations). “The truth is this”, he fumed: “China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful ‘deal’ so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame.” Strong words, and still more so coming from a respected climate campaigner. Is Lynas, too, simply reaching for “familiar villains”, as media commentator Tim Holmes has it? Or in the words of David Wearing, author of the Democrat’s Diary, unwittingly “relaying Western spin”?

I went over to ChinaDialogue seeking an alibi for the Chinese Government. But there I found other witnesses only too willing to pin the blame on the People’s Republic. Isabel Hilton, ChinaDialogue’s director, pulls few punches: “China played a heavily obstructive role”. The reporter Cao Haili writes that “China has bought some time” by resisting a stronger deal, even though “the Chinese government knows that eventually they will have to go in that direction.” The project’s development manager, Tan Copsey, argues: “The United States and China, the world’s largest historical contributor to climate change and the world’s largest current emitter, were at the heart of the failure to reach a more substantial agreement.” Meanwhile, Julian Wong, author of the excellent Green Leap Forward blog, reckons that China has done pretty well out of the Copenhagen Accord: “My unofficial final score ends up with China ahead… World 3.5, China 4.5.”

Did China show any flexibility in its stance? Yes: the US wrung an important concession from it on the international monitoring of emissions. This is significant, because as academic John Lee writes,  international teams of inspectors “…would see first hand and report back how China’s 45 million local officials remain the most formidable obstacle to improving transparency in China’s sprawling economic structure… Developed countries suspect that China will receive plaudits and concessions from any future carbon emissions regime without actually keeping its promises.” Also significant was the promise the Chinese government unveiled prior to Copenhagen – that it would cut carbon emissions relative to economic growth by 40% to 45% by 2020 compared with 2005 levels. There has been some debate as to whether this really represents a deviation from business-as-usual, since China has already been improving its energy efficiency by similar magnitudes over the past decade. Regardless of this, the continued compliance of local officials remains crucial in achieving this, and it’s not a given.

It isn’t only Western countries who are castigating China. Ali Yang from Greenpeace China comments that, whilst China generally allies itself with the G77, Copenhagen gave oxygen to the “cry of the most vulnerable developing countries for China to take more responsibility”.

Clearly, Copenhagen has revealed the limits of Beijing’s willingness to act on climate change: the Government doesn’t want to be bound by legal agreements and certainly isn’t prepared to set absolute emissions caps. Jonathan Watts recounts the words of a negotiator from an Asian nation: “China champions the position of the G77… But actually their position is very similar to that of the US. They are both major emitters who are refusing to accept binding consequences.”

For the past decade, the Western climate movement has demonised George W Bush’s America as the true climate criminals. It was a worthy target and good fun at the time, but an easy hit compared to the far trickier problem of the People’s Republic. Whilst the US continues to offer a pitiful 4% emissions target for 2020, it will rightly bear the brunt of international criticism. But how far will we also be prepared to criticise China?

Western human rights groups have rarely minced their words when it comes to Tibet, Chinese internet censorship or Tiananmen Square. By contrast, climate campaigners have so far felt compromised when considering the problem of Chinese emissions; after all, up to a quarter of them stem from manufacturing goods for the West. We have found it politic to focus our criticisms instead on Western governments, partly for sound ethical reasons – the West bears historical responsibility for climate damages already inflicted, and China has every right to develop – but also because we have little clue how to effectively influence China. True, most of the big green NGOs now have branches in Beijing or Shanghai; a native Chinese environmental movement has existed for some 15 years, though it remains subservient to government; and ChinaDialogue does a good job of stimulating discussion between campaigners. But all this seems a little incommensurate with the scale of the challenge.

I have no answers to this problem, and I’d welcome comments from those who do.  I’ll leave the last words to the BBC’s Richard Black, who frames the dilemma well:

“Having seen the deal emerge that the real leaders of China, India and the other large developing countries evidently wanted, how will those countries now be treated? How do you campaign in China?… The situation is especially demanding for those organisations that have traditionally supported the developing world on a range of issues against what they see as the west’s damaging dominance. After Copenhagen, there is no ‘developing world’ – there are several. Responding to this new world order is a challenge for campaign groups, as it will be for politicians in the old centres of world power.”

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