CANCUN OUTCOME

Kyoto Is Dead, Long Live Durban?

D Raghunandan

The Kyoto Protocol, with its crucial distinction between developed and developing countries, was critically wounded in Copenhagen and has virtually been buried at Cancun. It may be predicted with some condence that the Kyoto Protocol will be replaced at the next climate change conference in Durban by a single framework for all categories of nations. Binding and stiff emission reduction targets for developed countries, decided on the basis of the science and the sustainable upper limit for atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, now appear set to be replaced by a bottom-up pledge-and-review process with potentially dangerous outcomes for global climate.

This is an expanded and revised version of an article Cancunhagen: Glass More Than Three-Fourths Empty posted on the website of the Delhi Science Forum at http:// delhiscienceforum.net/environment/425cancunhagen-glass-three-fourths-empty.html. D Raghunandan (raghunandan.d@gmail.com) is with the Delhi Science Forum and All India Peoples Science Network.

n contrast to the huge letdown at Copenhagen, there is a fair bit of cheer about the Cancun climate summit, not merely in ofcial negotiating circles but even among environmental activists and progressive commentators.1 The reasoning goes that even if all that could have been wished for has not been achieved, especially as regards the deep emissions cuts required of developed countries, an agreement has been reached which not only seems to bridge the chasm between the developed and developing countries but also, and importantly, does so under the very United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) structures and processes that were so abused and critically wounded in Copenhagen. The set of texts agreed at the conference of parties-16 (COP-16), collectively called the Cancun Agreements cover both the Kyoto Protocol track pertaining to emission reductions by developed countries, and the Long-term Cooperative Action (LCA) track pertaining to actions by developing countries and related measures to be taken by developed nations. This restores to the twin-track negotiations process set in motion at Bali the legitimacy that was seriously questioned in Copenhagen. Checking deforestation is now high on the agenda and concrete measures have been decided. Adaptation has been given the attention it badly needs. Discussions on funding have made further progress and mechanisms for technology transfer have been set up. If all this momentum is carried forward, it is argued, then the UNFCCC negotiations process that was almost derailed at Copenhagen would be back on track to deliver the much needed global agreement at Durban in end-2011. This reasoning, however, is based on false hope rather than on the Cancun Agreement texts themselves and the geopolitical realities that have shaped them. Assessments of the supposed success of Cancun have been based more on an

agreement having been reached than on its contents, and even more so on atmospherics. The widely acclaimed diplomatic and managerial skills of the Mexican hosts, and the considerable achievement of the conference chair in ensuring that deliberations proceeded transparently and in accordance with UNFCCC procedures, all in stark contrast to the conduct of their Danish predecessors ensured that, in form, Cancun was indeed not Copenhagen. But, as this article will show, in content the Cancun Agreements are in fact very closely derived from the Copenhagen Accord, which was widely perceived to be deeply awed and a wedge that would cleave the Kyoto Protocol, and would have much the same consequences. It is argued here that far from giving any hope that its many shortcomings might be made up for over the coming year, the Cancun Agreement is structurally awed and lays down the basic framework for an agreement most likely to emerge in Durban.

Wounds on Kyoto
This article will demonstrate that the Kyoto Protocol, with its crucial distinction between developed and developing countries, was critically wounded in Copen hagen and has virtually been buried at Cancun. It may be predicted with some condence that the Kyoto Protocol will be replaced at Durban by a single framework for all categories of nations. Binding and stiff emission reduction targets for developed countries, decided on the basis of the science and the sustainable upper limit for atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations, now appear set to be replaced by a bottom-up pledge-and-review process with potentially dangerous outcomes for global climate. And even these emission reductions would be subject to uncertainties because of offsets, especially reduced deforestation in developing countries, Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects and other market-based mechanisms that have clearly failed in the past. And while mechanisms for funding and technology transfer to assist developing countries have advanced in Cancun, they are hedged in by numerous conditionalities. The glass is clearly much more than half empty. For all the supposed improvement of Cancun over the disaster at Copenhagen,

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the Cancun Agreements, for most of their operative sections, follow the Copenhagen Accord very closely. During the run-up to Copenhagen, and at the summit itself, the United States (US) had been pushing aggressively for a single framework to replace the differentiated Kyoto structure of binding emission cuts by developed countries and capability-based mitigation actions by developing countries aided by fund and technology transfer from the former. The Copenhagen Accord had been rightly pilloried both for being parachuted into the conference after back room deals between a select few under the US leadership and for following the latters prescription by providing just such a single framework, bringing together the US, other developed countries and a few large developing countries such as China, India, Brazil and South Africa. The Copenhagen Accord brought together developed and large developing countries as major emitters accounting for over 80% of current emissions. The focus on future emissions and the blurring of distinction between the developed and developing countries, served to ignore the main cause of climate change, namely the accumulated stock of historical emissions by developed countries amounting to around 80% of extant atmospheric GHS, and helped to evade the troubling issue of reparations for damage caused in the form of fund and technology transfers as obligatory compensation rather than aid. The accord, which was not adopted by the COP due to outright opposition by some countries and deep misgivings among many others, has been assiduously pushed by the US and its allies, and has since been signed on to by 140 nations of which 85 have pledged to either reduce emissions or slow down emissions growth. That accord has now been legitimised by the Cancun Agreements which, ofcially adopted by COP-16, are based on and incorporate these bottom-up pledges by both developed and developing nations along with almost all substantive formulations of the Copenhagen Accord. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton clearly acknowledged the straight line connecting Copenhagen and Cancun, and likely to extend to Durban: This outcome advances each of the core elements of the Copenhagen

Accord: they anchor the Accords mitigation pledges [and] the United States will continue building on this progress.2 The Cancun Agreements, in this case the text on Long-term Cooperative Action (hereafter Cancun-LCA), carry forward the Copenhagen perspective almost verbatim, and states that deep cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions are required according to science to hold the increase in global average temperature below 2C and that parties should take urgent action to meet this long-term goal, consistent with science and on the basis of equity.3 To be sure, the Cancun-LCA text does at least note the necessity of developed country Parties showing leadership by undertaking ambitious emission reductions (Cancun-LCA, para 2(2), page 2) and makes the obligatory acknowledgement of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities (ibid, para 1, page 1) without however acknowledging it as a principle. But these are only token genuections to a long emasculated idea and have little operational effect. The emphasis on global emissions targets and the deliberate omission in the Cancun Agreements of the crucial distinction between developed and developing country emissions, seen along with both developed and developing nations making mitigation pledges, mean that the idea of a single framework replacing the Kyoto Protocols differentiated approach is now here to stay. The Copenhagen framework has now gone from a de facto to an almost de jure status, and it is difcult to foresee any set of circumstances that may roll this back. If the basic structure of the Copenhagen Accord had dealt a major blow to the Kyoto Protocol, then the Cancun Agreements founded on all the basic premises of the accord amount to a coup de grace. It is telling that, in the Cancun Agreements, while the LCA document is 30 pages long, the Cancun Kyoto Protocol text (hereafter Cancun-Kyoto Protocol) is just two pages. Most of even this brief text only takes note of the low voluntary commitments made in the Copenhagen Accord and recorded in a list yet to be appended. It then, as discussed in detail further below, proceeds to insert qualifying statements in each paragraph serving to

dilute even these low pledges and to provide developed countries with escape clauses enabling such dilution. The Kyoto Protocol text appears to merely satisfy a formal requirement whereas most of the meat of the Cancun Agreements is contained in the LCA text, which in any case also contains most of the Cancun-Kyoto Protocol formulations. It can safely be predicted that this LCA text will for all practical purposes, form the single framework of any agreement that emerges at Durban, and the Kyoto Protocol text will either be incorporated within it or remain a pro forma yet dismembered limb outside it. Whether the pledges of developed and developing countries form annexures to the Kyoto Protocol or LCA texts respectively at Durban, or of a merged document built around the latter, remains a matter only of curiosity rather than of substance.

Science Mocked
Much has been made of phraseology in the Cancun Kyoto Protocol text recognising the nding of the IPCCs Fourth Assessment Report, Working Group III (IPCC/AR4/WG3), that achieving stabilisation levels of atmospheric GHS concentrations would require Annex 1 parties as a group to reduce emissions in a range of 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020.4 The text further urges [them to] raise the level of ambition of the emission reductions to be achieved by them individually or jointly (ibid, para 4, page 2). At the very least, this raises the question of what would be done if this urging does not translate into action. Would it, as one observer noted, mean that the triumph of Cancun will look as disastrous as the breakdown of talks in Copenhagen a year before?5

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More to the point, this is not, as it may seem at rst glance, an acceptance of the science, but an effort to appear to do so while using numbers to say things they did not originally mean, thus muddying the waters and playing down the emissions cut developed countries need to make. IPCC/AR 4/WG3 actually argues in some detail that, if atmospheric GHG concentrations and hence global temperature rise are to be reined in within a certain range, then developed nations should cut their emissions, as part of global emissions reductions, to the indicated extent but importantly, also emphasises that the lower end of the range would imply higher GHG concentrations and temperature rise.6 There is also little point in noting this range if all the pledges made by developed countries together amount to less than the bottom of that range and are further diluted not only by offsets but also by uncertainties arising from market-based determination of emission reduction measures. It has been argued that, unlike the Kyoto Protocol which bound countries to targets that would never help achieve the 2 degree goal because it did not address emissions by large developing countries, the Cancun Agreements provide a framework that actually makes this possible, if not now then at least later, by building a provision for increasing cuts subsequently (Light, ibid). This argument is specious because nothing prevented developing country mitigation targets being set and adopted under the Kyoto Protocol itself for the second commitment period. In fact, even IPCC/AR 4 had suggested that developing country emissions need to deviate below their projected baseline emissions within the next few decades,7 a fact also noted in Bali. Given the assiduous endeavours of the US and its allies over the years to dismantle the Kyoto Protocol and replace it with a single framework, efforts that now seem to be coming to fruition, these are self-serving arguments whose main purpose is to discredit the Kyoto Protocol, build ground for dismantling it, and push for lower emission cut targets for developed countries that may otherwise have been onerous, especially since more emission reduction burden would have been thrown on large developing countries. In

this light, seeing hope in the statement that developed nations will soon increase their emission reduction commitments is wishful thinking at best. It is well known that the voluntary pledges of the Copenhagen Accord, which have merely been reiterated at Cancun, are pitifully low and will denitely not be able to contain global temperature rise within 2 degrees C. In fact, this goal is itself of doubtful utility since, in operational terms, the level of GHG concentrations in the atmosphere would have been more directly linked to global emissions which are to be

regulated under the Kyoto Protocol and hence more useful, whereas global average temperature rise is an ultimate outcome that cannot be directly impacted. Nevertheless, this goal of 2 degrees C has been repeated ad nauseam for some time now, starting from the so-called Major Economies Forum at the G-8 summit at Heilegendamm, Germany, in 2008, in the full knowledge that it cannot be achieved with the levels of emission cuts pledged by the developed countries.8 At Cancun, this spurious goal has entered into formal UNFCCC documents for the rst time,

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misleading everyone into believing that targeted action is being taken. Any doubts on this count were cleared by the Emissions Gap Report released by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) on the eve of the Cancun Summit. The report estimates that total emissions till 2020 should not exceed 44 giga tonnes (billion tonnes) of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) if global temperature rise is to be kept within 2 degrees C. The report further projects that, even if all the pledges made at Copenhagen and after by 85 developed and developing nations are fullled, global emissions would reach 53 Gt by 2020, leaving a large gap of 9 Gt and consequently resulting in temperature rise in the order of 3-4 degrees C. If slightly more ambitious targets were adopted and if various methods to dodge actual emission cuts such as through various offsets were eschewed, this gap could be reduced to 5 Gt, but this would be only 60% of the requirement for containing temperature rise to 2 degrees C.9 And even at the unlikely 49 Gt level, the Report estimates that global temperature rise could be 2.5 degrees C. Several other studies released around the Cancun summit also concluded that with extant pledges, temperature rise is very unlikely to be contained within the 2 degrees C threshold and could well exceed 3 degrees.10

Neither Targets Nor Equity

All the leniency scenarios feared by the UNEP are in fact specically provided for in the Cancun Kyoto Protocol text, showing that developed countries intend to fully exploit these, and therefore that the emissions gap is likely to be closer to 9 Gt. The Cancun Kyoto Protocol text is riddled with qualiers and escape clauses for developed countries. The text emphasises that
emissions trading and the project-based mechanisms under the Kyoto Protocol [as well as] measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to enhance removals resulting from anthropogenic land use, land-use change and forestry activities shall continue to be available to Annex I Parties as means to meet their quantied emission limitation and reduction objectives (Kankun-Kyoto Protocol, para 6(c)).

In other words, northern countries would pay developing countries like, say, Brazil or Indonesia to reduce deforestation

and adjust this against their own emission reduction pledges. It also provides for the carry-over of units from the rst to the second commitment period (ibid, para 4), a provision originally intended for addingon rst-period decits to second commitment period targets, but here also enabling countries such as UK, Germany and an admittedly few other developed countries to deduct excess emissions reductions achieved during the rst period from second-period targets! In light of the above, perhaps the less said the better about the reference in the Cancun-LCA text to later review (in 201315) and consider strengthening the longterm global goal on the basis of the best available scientic knowledge, including in relation to a global average temperature rise of 1.5C (ibid, para 4). This is transparently a token nod towards the concerns of the island states and many least developed countries especially from Africa who have long been concerned that even a 2 degree temperature rise would bring untold miseries. There are also similar scattered and equally token obligatory references to equity, usually along with science, and with a similar disregard to equity in reality what with the Kyoto Protocol being virtually discarded, historical emissions ignored, developed countries continuing to occupy the atmospheric commons and denying developing countries development space. Having pushed developing countries into taking on mitigation burdens, the US and its allies continue to push them back even further. In the Cancun-LCA there is yet another attempt, after the abortive one at Copenhagen, to put the seal on a timeframe for global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions based on the best available scientic knowledge and equitable access to sustainable development (ibid, para 6). On the face of it, a global emissions maximum and a target year by when this should happen sounds like a good idea but, without simultaneously spelling out the proportion of carbon space utilised by developed and developing countries at that time, this is just a ruse by the developed countries to perpetuate their overoccupation of the atmospheric commons.11 The use of the loose term equitable access to sustainable development here rather

than a more direct reference to equitable share of carbon space shows that efforts by developed countries to close-off the atmospheric commons will persist.

Triumph of the Market

It seems that once the contentious issue of emissions reductions by developed and developing countries was addressed by pushing through the Copenhagen Accords single-framework pledge-and-review system, it was not too difcult at Cancun to line up the other ducks. Considerable progress was made on several issues notably on nance for which a new Green Climate Fund has been established, deforestation for which the much-touted Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) scheme was nalised, a new and badly needed Cancun Adaptation Framework, and technology transfer for which a Technology Executive Committee was set up. The Cancun Agreements have elaborated on the Copenhagen Accord pledges of a fast-start transfer of funds from developed to developing countries, apart from longer-term nancing, and the Cancun LCA text has spelt out these and related institutional mechanisms in some detail. Of course, the least developed countries and small island states are happy that funds are actually beginning to ow or soon will, and it did not really require the Wikileaks revelations for the world to know that the US and other developed countries have used this funding along with other blandishments and threats as powerful levers to manoeuvre these countries into the Copenhagen-Cancun framework, undoubtedly aided by the failure of India and other G-5 developing countries to cement alliances within the G-77 and project common interests with respect to developed countries, rather than joining the latter in backroom deals. Fast-track funding of $30 billion by 2012 and $100 billion dollars a year for developing countries by 2020 are repeated in Cancun LCA along with the establishment of a Green Climate Fund (ibid, Section IVA, paras 95-101) to be managed, at least initially, by the World Bank acting as trustee (ibid, para 107). It is however emphatically clear from the text that these funds are to be seen not as reparations for historical

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damage to the global atmospheric commons but as nancial assistance, that too with numerous caveats. And as with other aid from developed countries, there are many strings attached. Cancun-LCA states that these new and additional resources [would include] forestry and investments through international institutions (ibid, para 95) thus clarifying that fund transfers would include offsets, project nancing or even soft loans. The seemingly large fund ows are also a mirage since the commitment is only to a goal of mobilising jointly USD 100 billion (ibid, para 98) which, again, are not budgetary transfers from developed countries but may come from a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources (ibid, para 99). And all this only if developing countries behave properly, since these funds are conditional upon, or euphemistically put, in the context of meaningful mitigation actions and transparency on implementation (ibid, para 98) by developing countries. The REDD scheme is based on the essentially correct idea of reducing deforestation and thus increasing the capacity to absorb carbon emissions, but in addition to actual emission reductions especially in developed countries. However, as it has evolved over the past few years leading to Cancun, it has now become one of the main modes of fund transfers from developed to developing countries and a major means for the former to avoid actual emissions reductions in their own countries. REDD is now certain to be part of any future global arrangement, along with CDM projects and other project-based nancing, and becomes yet another link in the rapidly closing circle of commodication of the global commons. In fact, the Cancun Agreements represent a triumph of the market, since the common thread running across its various strategies and institutional mechanisms is the dominant role of market mechanisms rather than target-led regulation in guiding and shaping mitigation actions, arresting deforestation, techno logy transfer and funding. However, Cancun cannot be blamed for this problem which has been an integral part of the evolving global climate compact certainly since Bali.

Conclusion
In sum, it appears that Cancun has more or less outlined and stitched together major elements of a global agreement likely to be clinched at Durban. So there may be some justication to a feeling at least of relief that at last some global agreement on climate change may nally be on the cards, and under UN aegis to boot. But the agreement promises to be a poor one from the standpoints of both science and equity. Market mechanisms will now clearly dominate how emissions reductions take place, and the planets ecology has been fully commodied. The UN process has been successfully moulded to yield an agreement that meets the requirements of the US and its northern allies. In the year to go before Durban, many challenges confront those who seek to achieve climate stabilisation and equity, and who continue to engage with the UNFCCC negotiations process towards this end. But there seems to be a growing chasm between the deep cuts in developed country emissions called for by the science, the Kyoto Protocol principles of common but differentiated responsibilities and climate justice on the one hand, and the pledgeand-review, market-driven system on the other. Can this circle be squared?
Notes
1 Without wanting to unfairly single out any person or organisation for what has been a fairly widespread sentiment, examples of such an assessment are to be found in statements or articles by Greenpeace (http:// www.greenpeace.org/new-zealand/ en/news/Cancun-agreement-builds-towards-aglobal-climate-deal, 13 Dec 2010), Oxfam UK (http://www.oxfam.org.uk/applications/blogs/ pressofce/2010/12/13/cancun-building-blocksof-a-climate-deal-are-laid), the Tck-Tck-Tck campaign calling Cancun a balanced package in http://live.tcktcktck.org/2010/12/climate-makesa-comeback-in-cancun, 13 Dec 2010). 2 http://blogs.state.gov/index.php/site/entry/secretary_clinton_welcomes_cancun_agreements. The idea that Cancun has expanded upon and brought the Copenhagen Agreement into the UN framework has also been argued by numerous other commentators, e g, Andrew Light, The Cancun Compromise: Masterful Diplomacy Ends with Agreement, 13 December 2010 in http:// www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/12/cancun_compromise.html. 3 Outcome of the work of the Ad Hoc Working Group on long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention, Draft Decision CP/16 (hereafter Cancun-LCA), para 4, p.2, available at http://unfccc.int/les/ meetings/cop_16/application/pdf/cop16_lca.pdf 4 Outcome of the work of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol at Its Fifteenth (sic) Session (hereafter Cancun-KP), page 1, available at http://unfccc.int/les/meetings/cop_16/application/pdf/cop16_kp.pdf

5 Fred Pearce, Cancun Success May Be Skin Deep, New Scientist blog, 12 December 2010, available at http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19860cancun-success-may-be-skin-deep.html 6 See IPCC/AR4/WG3 Chapter 3. 7 IPCC/AR4/WG3 p.90 in http://www.ipcc.ch/ pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg3/ar4-wg3-ts.pdf 8 For further discussion of the implications of a temperature rise goal, and geopolitics underlying this choice, see various articles by the author in the Delhi Science Forum website at www.delhiscienceforum.net, especially G8 Climate Declaration: Cart Before the Horse, 15 July 2009, at http://delhi scienceforum.net/environment/383-g8-climatedeclaration-cart-before-the-horse.html, and G8+5: numbers dont addd up for climate change at http://delhiscienceforum.net/environment/269g85-numbers-dont-add-up-for-climate-change-.html 9 United Nations Environment Programme, Emissions Gap Report, December 2010, available at http:// www.unep.org/publications/ebooks/emissionsgapreport. See especially Key ndings Box on page 4 of the Executive Summary for highlights of these numbers. 10 See for instance Mark G New et al, Four Degrees and Beyond, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, available at http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/site/2011/four_degrees.xhtml 11 For detailed elucidation of this argument, and the notion of fair shares in the atmospheric commons, see Tejal Kanitkar, T Jayaraman et al, Global Carbon Budgets and Burden Sharing in Mitigation Actions in Conference papers on Global Carbon Budgets and Equity in Climate Change, June 2010, Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India, also available on the Ministrys website at http://moef.nic.in/downloads/publicinformation/tiss-conference-cc-2010.pdf

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