Feb 5 (Reuters) - Nations will try to agree on a broader
climate pact at the end of the year in the Danish capital to
replace the Kyoto Protocol, the United Nations' main tool to
fight climate change.
Following are responses by leading Australian climate
change policy analyst Warwick McKibbin on the risks facing the
Copenhagen talks. McKibbin is executive director of the Centre
for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis at the Australian National
University in Canberra.
APART FROM THE WORLD FINANCIAL CRISIS, WHAT OTHER RISKS DO
THE TALKS FACE?
The financial crisis is upfront and in your face and
affects the ability of countries to pay for climate abatement
and adaptation.
But the deeper problem it highlights is the basic notion
that is trying to be negotiated, and that is to pre-commit
today to a target that's out in the future where you have very
little certainty on what the future will actually look like
when you get there.
If you're sitting here today and you have no population
growth and you're an advanced economy, you can pretty well
predict your emissions are going to be roughly what they are
today, plus or minus, in 20 years.
But if you're a country that could be growing at between 6
and 12 percent a year for the next 20 years, the target you
pick or commit to today for 20 years' time could be orders of
magnitude away from what you could afford to hit when you get
there.
This shows the basic flaw in the Kyoto strategy of
negotiating targets and timetables.
WHAT ARE THE MAIN DRIVERS TO GET A DEAL DONE?
There has to be a backing off of this religious zeal that
all countries have to cut equally by 2050. There is no science
in that at all. The science is at the global level in terms of
concentrations, not at the national level in terms of
emissions.
But the politics is such that every country is deemed to
have a target by a certain quantity and we have to negotiate
that outcome.
The main drivers to success will be when countries back-off
the absolutism of targets and timetables and realise what we
are trying to achieve here is a global concentration target at
lowest economic cost. The question is what's the best way to
achieve it in terms of minimising costs, equitable burden
sharing and maximising the environmental reductions that we can
achieve.
IS THERE A WAY TO DESIGN CLIMATE POLICY TO GET RICH AND
POOR NATIONS TO SIGN UP TO A REPLACEMENT FOR THE KYOTO
PROTOCOL?
I think there is. The first point is that you don't sit
down and try to do a standardised deal for all countries to
sign up to.
What you do is you first start off with trying to design a
deal where the top-10 emitters will sign up because that's 90
percent of global emissions.
Secondly, whatever you design it has to be seen by those
who ratify it to be in their own national interest rather than
being a deal that only held together by some form of threat or
sanction. Because threats and sanctions, when the crunch comes,
don't work.
So the design has to be based on national actions deemed to
be in a country's self interest, glued together through
cooperation to create a global carbon reduction and adaptation
strategy.
DO YOU SEE SIGNS THAT CHINA AND INDIA ARE WILLING TO
COMPROMISE AND AGREE TO SOME SORT OF EMISSIONS TARGETS, SUCH AS
SECTORAL TARGETS?
I see more signs of willingness in China than India. We've
seen already that China has been willing to take fairly severe
actions to be part of the global community through the WTO
process.
China has a lot of domestic issues... But the more you try
to centralise agreements so everybody does the same thing, the
less you are able to build in national actions that are in the
national interest.
IF THE TALKS FAIL, OR STALL, WHAT THEN?
These talks never end in failure. There's always a press
release which is based on moving forward and greater
cooperation in which countries pledge to take action at some
future date. But nothing much happens because the framework
being negotiated is not designed appropriately.
Would people regard the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 ending in
failure? I would say absolutely because emissions today are
well in excess of any forecast people made in 1997, let alone
what the targets were in 1997.
I think all of these talks have failed but all of the
outcomes have looked pretty good from a political point of view
because politicians have committed to targets that were outside
the political cycle that they worry about.
(Reporting by David Fogarty; Editing by David Fox)
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