Perspectives #02/2009: On the road to Copenhagen
Experience tells us it will not be easy. It has taken 17 years of negotiations and advancement in climate science since the adoption of the UNFCCC in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 to get to this watershed. Along this journey has come the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change in 1997, the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report a decade later and the subsequent adoption of the Bali Roadmap in December 2007. The task in Copenhagen is to craft a legally binding international agreement to follow the end of the Kyoto Protocol’s first commitment period, which ends in 2012.
Going to Copenhagen the Parties agree that a post-2012 climate change regime comprising enhanced action on climate change adaptation and mitigation, technology cooperation and climate financing is vital. However, among other issues, agreement on deep and binding emissions reduction targets for developed countries – as required by science – and the magnitude, source and destination of climate finance for adaptation and mitigation in developing countries remains elusive.
As a green political foundation, the Heinrich Boell Foundation (HBF) has focused on climate change and the political solutions to overcome it for many years. In keeping with this objective and against the background of expected dire impacts of climate change in the Southern African region, this issue of Perspectives reflects on the winding road to Copenhagen, reviews the agenda at the Copenhagen negotiations, and considers some of the neglected issues at climate change negotiations.
Setting the scene, Lwandle Mqadi’s article underlines the gravity of the climate change challenge to Southern Africa and the region’s biggest economy South Africa as illustrated by the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report. Mqadi also outlines the region’s positions on the key issues being negotiated in Copenhagen, which, are strongly informed by its historical and developmental imperatives.
In the second article, Masego Madzwamuse, argues that adaptation to climate change is a legitimate demand by developing countries at climate change negotiations and outlines why adaptation has only recently begun to command proportionate attention in these negotiations. Against a long history of vulnerability to climate variability compounded by additional stressors such as HIV/ Aids the article makes a case for the elevation of adaptation as a response to climate change in Southern Africa. Madzwamuse argues for a nuanced dialogue on adaptation at climate change negotiations and calls for the incorporation of civil society in enabling an effective response to climate change through adaptation.
The final article by Leonie Joubert considers the threat posed by climate change to human and national security and interrogates why climate-related conflict, already evident in some parts of the African continent, does not feature on the agenda at climate change negotiations. The article makes the very important point that the climate change challenge should not be viewed as only bringing conflict and strife to the continent but also ushering in new platforms for conflict resolution and broader cooperation.
As we approach the defining point for what has been a protracted process towards a post-2012 climate regime it is our hope that this issue of Perspectives will bring about a broader and deeper understanding of the issues at stake in Copenhagen and some of the more salient concerns for the Southern African region in the global pursuit for a comprehensive response to climate change.