The Business of Climate Change

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Climate change negotiations are a frustrating business. The first time I went to a Conference of Parties (or COP - the big end-of year negotiations which Ministers attend and will this year be held in Copenhagen) was COP-12 in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2006. I joined the thousands of delegates from almost every country in the world and many thousands more observers from non-governmental organisations or media on the UN compound there. It's a big compound in Nairobi but not big enough to house all the participants, so they had erected lots of tents on grassy areas too (grass that turned increasingly to mud with all those people around), and there were cafes set up to feed and water us all. When I arrived I felt as if my closest life experience to date had been attending the big British rock festival in Glastonbury as a student.

When I joined my first official negotiating session there, I began to wonder if I was the crazy one or if it was almost everyone else around me. There was heated discussion about phrases or individual words or even punctuation marks. What were people talking about? I haven't been to a COP since COP-13 in Bali, Indonesia in 2007. But two recent conversations suggest the pace of the negotiations hasn't changed drastically. At a lunch with Sunita Narain, one of India's most eloquent and well-informed environmental advocates, she told me that she had been to last year's COP in Poznan after a gap of many years and had vowed never to go again. During a call with my High Commissioner on new Minister of Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh, he told us that he had spoken the day before to one of his officials at a negotiating session in Bonn, Germany, where there had been a twenty-minute discussion over where in a negotiating text to place a semi-colon.

Add this to the old climate change joke, that the best way immediately to reduce carbon emissions would be stop all those people flying to the negotiations, and it's not difficult to get disillusioned with the whole UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process.

Well yes, be disillusioned. Demand more from the representatives of your Government and other people's Government's too (like the UK's!). For years the science and economics of climate change has been getting more refined, and emphasising that the scale and urgency of the climate challenge is larger and more rapid than we had previously thought. And yet the negotiations appear to proceed at a glacial pace, or caught in a bubble through which the science, economics and popular desire for action can't seem to penetrate

But don't let that disillusionment turn to apathy. And don't expect that there will be a better process along soon. Because as with so many UN processes, if the UNFCCC didn't exist we'd have to invent it. How else can you treat the greatest challenge facing humanity today, the greatest market failure, the greatest free-rider problem? We need every country to take part, to try and ensure that every voice is heard - especially in Copenhagen. Of course that makes for a messy, chaotic, frustrating experience. And given the need to modulate between all these different countries, of course the process is laborious and at times bureaucratic. But don't take your eyes from the prize.

Because what we can't allow ourselves to be lulled into believing with all this negotiating "hot air" is that we can negotiate with the climate itself. We can't. The science tells us what we can expect to happen and it's not pretty. The British Government, our EU colleagues and many eminent scientists, politicians and civil society organisations around the world believe that the deal we need to agree in Copenhagen should limit average global temperature rise to 2 degrees above the average temperature before the industrial revolution - we're more than 0.7 degrees above pre-industrial levels already and committed to even more. Most scientists agree that the 2 degree figure marks the threshold for dangerous and irreversible tipping points in the climate. And there is no negotiating with these. But let me pick up from here next time...