Regardless of what effect the Copenhagen Accord will have in the future, most people would agree the Copenhagen climate change summit left a huge breach between developing and developed countries.
This week, the world gathers in Bonn, Germany, for another round of climate change talks. The biggest challenge will be building trust between the two camps once again. It will not be easy to repair the damage done in Copenhagen last year. But without that first step, nothing will be achieved in this round, wasting more time – which is one thing the world doesn’t have much of when it comes to climate change.
One of the few assurances to the developing world in Copenhagen was the promise of the West to provide USD 30 billion of “new and additional” funding annually till 2012, with that number going up to USD 100 billion per year by 2020.
And herein lays the problem, precisely in the “new and additional” part. As a result of the mistrust that resulted from the Copenhagen meeting, developing countries feel that industrialized nations will just rename some of the older aid promises and repackage them to fulfill their ‘promise’.
In a paper published by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), academics warned that the developed world’s promise would be meaningless without first defining a baseline. The say that a UN-based system to define baselines and monitor pledges is the only way to regain the lost trust.
“Funding from developed countries to help developing countries tackle climate change has the potential to re-build the lost trust between the two sets of countries — but only if it is done properly,” says Saleemul Huq, a senior fellow in IIED’s climate change group. “Agreeing on baselines for assessing ‘new and additional’ climate funds is key.”
As the next round of talks starts in Bonn, it will be important to see how this issue will be addressed. If the West decides to ignore it, then the talks are set to fail before they start. Trust is the defining ingredient for a global climate agreement.
The full paper can be found here.
On another note, and just in time for the Bonn talks, the UNDP just released the Arabic version of its report “The Outcomes of Copenhagen – The Negotiations & The Accord.”
I wish the translated report came out earlier, Arab policymakers would have definitely found it useful going into the Bonn discussions. But better late than never, I guess.
I’m not very excited about the expected outcomes of the upcoming discussions, but I will be keeping my eyes open. A surprise may be just around the corner.