john yeld

The US under then President George HW Bush was viewed as the "spoiler" at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro when a compromise UNFCCC climate change convention was negotiated and agreed.

WHEN thousands of delegates from all over the world descend on Durban for the COP17 climate change conference that starts on November 28, all of them will be acutely aware of the urgency of the deliberations that will happen there during the following fortnight.

Probably few of them, however, will know just how far the climate change debate stretches back.

The so-called “greenhouse effect” on climate was theorised as early as 1824 and proved experimentally in 1858, and by 1896 there was a firm scientific prediction that carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels like coal would cause global warming.

But the world paid little attention, and temperature measurements during the heavy industrialisation era of the 1940s and 1950s actually showed the opposite was happening – there was a slight cooling of the average global temperature.

It took scientists years to figure out just what had been going on. In fact, the greenhouse effect had been operating, but its impact was masked by the immensely dirty industrial emissions of that era that contained so much sulphur that they were blocking sunlight – and hence heat – from reaching the surface of the Earth.

As tougher air pollution measures kicked in and much sulphur was removed from the smoggy emissions, the warming impact of the greenhouse effect began to manifest itself again.

But it was really only during the 1960s that the world’s scientific community started to investigate the phenomenon, and it was another decade before evidence that human activities were interfering with the global climate really emerged in the public arena as a major concern.

This was in February 1979 during the First World Climate Conference that was organised by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) in the Swiss capital, Geneva.

This conference also led eventually to the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988. Founded jointly by the WMO and the UN Environment Programme, the IPCC was charged with collecting and assessing independent scientific information on the subject.

Also in 1988, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution proposed by Malta that urged “protection of global climate for present and future generations of mankind”.

The IPCC issued its First Assessment Report in 1990 in which it warned that the threat of human-induced climate change was real. Although it couched this warning in innocuous, carefully worded terms, the report nevertheless added significant impetus to diplomatic moves already under way in the UN since 1985 to draft the first global treaty on climate change.

The Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee tasked with this mandate duly produced a draft climate convention that was presented as one of the three showpiece conventions for approval at the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

Not surprisingly, the draft UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, usually just called by its initials, UNFCCC, was vigorously opposed by the big oil-producing and oil-burning nations like Saudi Arabia and, particularly, the US, then the world’s biggest polluter by far. US President George W Bush senior was widely criticised for being the main spoiler.

Eventually, the compromise text of a significantly weakened UNFCCC convention was accepted.

By June 1993, 166 countries had signed up and it duly came into force on March 21 1994. As of September this year, it has 194 member states and the EU.

The US, having won a diplomatic victory to ensure there were no emissions targets specified in the convention, was in fact an early signatory and ratified the convention in October 1992.

The UNFCCC convention sets a “lofty but specific goal”: to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations “at a level that will prevent dangerous anthropogenic (human-induced) interference with the climate system”.

Such a level should be achieved “within a time-frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened, and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner”.

The convention puts the onus specifically on so-called Annex 1 countries – developed countries that had historically produced most of the emissions during 150-plus years of industrialisation – to lead the way.

A crucial principle of the convention at the heart of all climate change negotiations is that of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities”.

Since 1994, the signatories have met annually as the Conference of the Parties, or the COP, with COP1 taking place in Berlin in 1995.

COP3, held in the ancient Japanese capital city of Kyoto in 1997, was particularly significant because here the parties agreed to targets for emission reductions, specified in a legally binding document: the Kyoto Protocol.

The protocol committed 37 (now 39) Annex 1 countries to reducing their overall emissions of greenhouse gases by 5.2 percent below 1990 levels for the period 2008 to 2012, the so-called first commitment period.

The protocol – explicitly rejected by US President George W Bush – had a complex ratification process and it finally entered force only in February 2005.

This meant the 11th Conference of Parties (COP11) held in Montreal, Canada, in December 2005 also became the first Meeting of Parties (MOP1) of the protocol.

Since then, each annual summit has consisted of two separate but closely linked meetings: the COP and the MOP, although the MOP is now (tortuously) known as the Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties, or CMP.

Durban, therefore, will be COP17/CMP7.

The essential difference between the two meetings is that the US is a member of the COP with full participating rights, but is only an observer – although still wielding considerable diplomatic clout – to the proceedings of the CMP.

The ideal outcome for Durban would be the merging of these two negotiating tracks and unanimous agreement on either extending the Kyoto Protocol with the US as a full Annex 1 member, or on a completely new treaty to replace Kyoto but which will also have legally binding emissions targets and include the US.

There is, unfortunately, near-unanimous agreement that neither of these scenarios is possible, and that COP17/CMP7 will produce a rather more modest outcome.

l John Yeld is the Cape Argus’s Environment & Science Writer

john.yeld@inl.co.za