Features: Understanding the climate change negotiations
November 7th, 2011Published on Pambazuka News, by Lim Li Lin, November 2, 2011.
As the international climate change negotiations intensify in the run up to the Durban, South Africa COP 17, developed countries are pushing hard to destroy some of the UN processes and measures that could save the Earth from the brink, writes Lim Li Lin.
There are two main treaties in the global climate change negotiations, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which was part of the package of environmental treaties that was adopted in Rio in 1992 and entered into force in 1994, and the Kyoto Protocol (KP), which is linked to the UNFCCC and was adopted in 1997. The KP entered into force in 2005.
An important point about these treaties is that they are multilateral treaties under the UN. Under these two treaties there are two subsidiary bodies: the Joint Implementation Committee (JIC) and the Scientific and Technological Advice Committee (STAC). These two bodies support the KP and the UNFCCC … //
… The fundamental problem is that if there is a new treaty, then there is nothing to stop countries like Russia and Japan from choosing to have lower obligations than those of the Kyoto Protocol, especially if the USA is part of that new treaty.
Within the Kyoto Protocol, the part that civil societies in particular loathe is the market mechanisms. There are many groups that have been campaigning against the Kyoto Protocol for many years because of the market mechanisms. They really need to be rolled back and eliminated. There should not be any new market mechanisms, but under the new negotiations of the AWG-LCA, Annex 1 countries are already trying to migrate all of the market mechanisms from the Kyoto Protocol into a new treaty.
We need to be aware of these dynamics because we need to ensure that if we are not going to create a new ship for all of the developed countries to jump into, then market mechanisms must not be migrated into the other track of negotiations. Ultimately, Parties, especially developing countries, may need a process within the COP MOP to review and attempt to eliminate the market mechanisms. (full long text).
(My comment: I continue to think that the whole Climat Change story is a big joke, making peoples reduce, reduce, reduce … themselves, their economy, their development … reduce all what would give them a real consciousness of free and grown up men and women. But as the bargaining between nations has become an international law, its this process we have to control, as at the end all remains a simple power play, belonging to rules of old feudalism and social darwinism).
Links:
Conference of the Parties COP, COP17/CMP7 UNs Climate Change Conference 2011, Durban /South Africa;
COP/MOP on JI Rulebook, COP-MOP 4, COP-MOP 5;
Framework Convention on Climate Change UNFCCC;
Kyoto Protocol KP;
Joint Monitoring and Implementation Committee JOMIC;
Conference of the Parties COP;
Ad-Hoc Working Group on the Kyoto Protocol AWG-KP;
Ad-Hoc Working Group on Long Term Cooperative Action AWG-LCA.