Today at Brown

Professor Timmons Roberts, director of Brown’s Center for Environmental Studies, is blogging for Today at Brown from the UN Climate Change Conference (COP15) in Copenhagen, Denmark. This is his second report. Read his first dispatch here.

Timmons Roberts COPENHAGEN, December 12, 2009:   The halls are buzzing, and the United Nations is going to start rationing entry permits to major events starting Tuesday. This is far bigger than any previous international climate meeting – and the 120 heads of state haven't even gotten here yet.

It’s hard for me to say whether things are going well or not. The tensions in the negotiations here are old ones that keep resurfacing, especially between wealthy and poor nations. On Tuesday, the tiny island nation of Tuvalu, with 10,000 people living just one to two meters above sea level on a Pacific atoll, introduced its own plan for a “Copenhagen Protocol” that would continue from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the original 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Other developing nations, particularly China and Tuvalu supporters rally at the COP15 talks. India, don’t want to risk blurring the clear line between wealthy and poor nations that is enshrined in the Kyoto Protocol. I find it worrisome that negotiators are still arguing about something so basic only one week before the deadline for deciding the details of a successor treaty. Unless new pressure comes to bear, we likely will have a political agreement but no legally binding treaty this year.

The language of “climate justice,” something we barely heard just a few years ago, is now in the formal statements of many poor nations and seen and heard in the hallways, where non-governmental groups have booths and hand out leaflets. Today, in fact, climate justice was the theme of placards and chants in the protest march of 60,000 people, which someone told me was the largest protest in the history of Denmark.

What is climate justice, and how do we get there? I’ve been writing and thinking about the subject for a long time, but it seems to me there are significant differences in the ways people understand the term. At the core is the belief that those who created the climate problem – those of us in wealthy countries – are not the ones suffering first and worst. Some poor countries propose that we owe them a “carbon debt” – a payment to help them adapt to climate change or to compensate them for using so much of the world’s resources and atmosphere.

More broadly, of course, climate justice requires that we fairly share the consequences of our carbon emissions. My friends in the think tank EcoEquity have proposed “Greenhouse Development Rights” – the best framework I've seen for fairly apportioning emissions rights, while also raising the funds needed for developing countries to adapt and avoid increasing their own emissions.

“There is no future scenario,” says EcoEquity’s latest paper, “…in which the developing world has sufficient space to avoid a decarbonization transition so rapid that, without a shift away from familiar modes of development, it threatens prospects for development for the world’s poor. …

“The only way to secure the earnest engagement of the developing world in a global climate accord is for the developed world to exhibit a rapid transformation in its emission trajectory … while ensuring that the developing countries are provided with the support necessary to enable a decarbonization transition that is rapid and comprehensive, but that also allows human development to continue unimpeded.”

What is on the table in Copenhagen this week pales compared to this far-thinking, fairness-based approach, in my opinion. The United States could be a leader among wealthy nations with both emissions cuts and funding for developing countries’ adaptations.