An urgent call for international and intergenerational justice at the UN climate talks, while Arab Youth Climate Movement forges change
“In the session for the Green Climate Fund a woman from South Africa stood up to ask a question. She said, “My ancestral lands are going to go through a 4-5 degree increase even if the world stays at 2 degrees… Grass stops growing at 38 degrees and our livestock will die. So whatever we have managed to preserve through genocide and colonialism, we are going to lose through climate change. As an Indigenous person when I lose my land, I lose my culture. I am sorry about your recession. I am experiencing a bit of compassion fatigue. I am humiliated that I have to stand here and say how much, where, how? So I’m asking you for whatever your ancestors have done; if you want the climate fund be the restorative justice it is meant to be, can we do it now? Don’t leave it for your children to share with mine.”” (As reported by the Arab Youth Climate Movement)
At its heart, global climate change is a question of international and intergenerational equity. After a year of extreme weather and human loss around the world, leaders need to urgently bring ambition to the principle of equity here at COP18 -the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations in Doha. As part of a group of young people that attended the climate talks (26 November-7 December), it is clear that the conference was, more than anything, about how history will judge the climate legacy that leaders left behind – and how history will condemn those who didn’t act when the devastating impacts of climate change were so imminent.
The story of us and now
The stories I have heard, even here at the negotiations, are abundant, increasingly heartbreaking, and ever more personal: droughts in East Africa, floods in Pakistan, typhoons in Taiwan, cyclones in Qatar, mountain glacier melt in Nepal, sinking islands in the Maldives, and of course Hurricane Sandy, which killed more than 250 people on its way through the Caribbean and the United States. While we can’t count tragedy in numbers, the overwhelming human cost of climate change should serve as a wake up call. In the perverse games of diplomacy played in the halls of the Qatar National Convention Centre the last two weeks, the pawns were not only forests and oceans, but more and more, human lives.
Leaders had already agreed to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius. But, as the conference made abundantly clear, there is a huge gap between words and action. Unless we drastically mitigate emissions from the current trajectory, a recent World Bank report predicts that global average temperatures will rise to four degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and describes how this kind of world would look. When the impacts we are seeing now are already this tragic, it is daunting to imagine the predictions of a further rise.
At the Doha climate talks, world leaders faced the choice of framing what climate legacy they chose to leave our generation: a short-termist, precarious future dictated by the fossil fuel industry, or a transition to a low-carbon economy dictated by human prosperity and ecological integrity.
What will be decided in Doha?
The mandate of the UNFCCC, born of the first UN Earth Summit in 1992, was to avoid dangerous climate change by securing efforts from all countries at the global scale. The goal was to set the foundation and principles for adopting a legally binding deal by 2015. Another crucial objective is to adopt the second commitment period to the Kyoto Protocol, as the first expires this December. Leaders are now deciding on the specific emissions mitigation targets for the following years. The United States, however, is threatening to bail out on the post-Kyoto process. Instead of binding obligations, the US is suggesting countries pledge as they please, utterly lagging behind the ambition needed and committed to by most other parties. The urgency, scale, and inequity associated with the real-world impacts of climate change have to enter above all the US consciousness, and provide the roadmap for 2015 under the Durban Platform.
Common but Differentiated Responsibility
Equity is the only pathway to ambition in the climate talks. Without it, those least responsible for climate change will inevitably carry its heaviest burdens. And they will carry this burden not in money, which is what it would take for rich countries to provide already promised assistance, but in human lives. Despite this, it seems that developed countries, enabled by US backwardness, are hoping to altogether erase the crucial principles of ‘Common but Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities’ (CBDR-RC) from the text. Under this indispensible principle, equity can be translated in the new climate deal to sharing both the challenges and opportunities of the transition to a climate-resilient economy, in a way that doesn’t place unfair burdens on countries least responsible and able to act.
If Common but Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR) is cut out, the poorest countries, which have absolutely marginal emissions compared to the US, would be facing comparable obligations. The lack of CBDR as a legal principle would completely ignore the enormous emissions history of those currently in power in rich nations. So the United States is essentially asking us to erase its criminal history of fossil fuel emissions, saying it won’t compensate for the damages it has incurred.
The imperative of international equity and intergenerational justice
Furthermore, without equity and differentiated responsibility, curbing climate change is also ineffective. It remains very much a fact that the richest countries pollute most per capita. Equity means that those most responsible for climate change by historic and international responsibility must take responsibility at home with clear and ambitious mitigation targets. By some recent estimates, broadly 1% of the world’s population emits 50% of the global emissions. The around 70% of the population below the development threshold are then responsible for only 15% of global emissions. Therefore, we are being counterintuitive unless we put more political and legal pressure on those parties that put most pressure on the planet.
It is thus important to note that climate finance is not aid but it is what is owed. The Green Climate Fund should be built on restorative justice based on historical responsibility for emissions. Leaders have already agreed that all finance be “new and additional, predictable, and adequate in relation to rapidly spiralling needs.” To live up to their words, the pledge of $100bn per year by 2020 from developed countries to climate finance needs to become a reality by the end of Doha.
Suing for loss
Where mitigation or even adaptation are not enough to help countries ravaged by climate change, the further route of ‘loss and damage’ has become a possibility. This negotiation route would provide assistance and compensation for lost habitable territories, human impacts, and economic damage from climate change. Another untapped possibility is international litigation on behalf of groups or individuals. There have been proposals from organizations like the Foundation for International Environmental Law and Development, that parties could use the UNFCCC’s dispute settlement mechanism to bring issues to the conciliation commission. The commission, in turn, could develop forceful international law on climate change to serve parties in need.
The Arab Spring of climate action
Since this year’s talks are held in the Middle East, the Arab Youth Climate Movement (AYCM) has emerged in these weeks as a beacon of hope in the midst of lagging action. And it is a force to be reckoned with. Based in a region with the one of the youngest populations in the world, AYCM is demonstrating leadership in climate action, driven by the huge potential unleashed by the recent youth-led revolutions in the Arab world. Taki Djeffal, an Algerian member of AYCM, described how “fear was erased in us by the Arab spring.” This audacity is now being applied to finding solutions to climate change. Some AYCM members also highlighted how integral transitioning their economies is, because when the oil business is over, there will be a huge need for other sources of employment and social security. These should be found through the emergence of education for transition and sustainable jobs, spearheaded by this young generation of Arabs. A climate march this Saturday in Doha, one of the first marches on climate change in the Arab world, gave us a glimpse of this intergenerational force of change and the climate legacy these young people demand.
Obama’s Climate Legacy?
In his re-election speech, Barack Obama declared:
“We want our children to live in an America that is not burdened by debt, that is not weakened by inequality, that is not threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.”
It was young people who elected Obama in the hope of change, and young people from all around the world rely on US taking action, both at the negotiations, but also domestically in the next few years. Hurricane Sandy should have been the last straw to show the United States that no one is safe from climate change. The Obama administration has to take a lead on repaying the climate debt United States has incurred on the world and future generations. International and intergenerational equity need to take the form of adequate financing of the Green Climate Fund, and binding mitigation goals. Obama needs to pledge his commitment and the leadership of his administration to keeping the world well below 2 degrees Celsius warming. The math of Obama’s 17% emissions reduction goal is ludicrous if he doesn’t. And if not Obama, who; and if not now, when?
As the negotiations draw to a close, an open letter by US youth at Doha asks, “One way or another, history will judge your administration by your response to climate crisis. For our part, we have no choice but to fight for our future. We are asking you to join us.” The work has to begin now.