After 2 weeks and further 40 extra hours of negotiation, the non binding Durban's agreement only mentions that an binding instrument will be developed by 2015 to be implemented in 2020. It sounds like an obese person that for 19 years (the amount of years spent to find a binding solution on climate issue since the first summit) carried on to postpone a diet that could save his life. Would you trust such agreement? It would be a blind irresponsibility. There is no other way to define the behaviour of who governs the world today. How is it possible to still postpone an agreement while climate change causes 350.000 deaths every year, 50 million environmental refugees, sea level rise, threats of disappearance of small island states in the Pacific, destruction of coastal states' economies, ocean acidification, desertification of entire regions, threats over hundreds of million jobs, and loss of biodiversity at levels of mass extinction never reached before. But the Kyoto protocol, the only agreement standing that bides industrialised countries to reduce their emissions, has been buried here in Africa, the first continent to be literally cooked by the climate chaos.
The COP17 will be remembered as a failure for all humanity and a good business for the ones contributing to increase the planet fever. For main polluter governments like the United States of America and China, we should wait 2015 to negotiate an agreement to be bidingly implemented in 2020. The problem is that we have no 10 years time ahead to act! Scientific findings are clear. If we want to avoid being responsible of an increase of temperature superior to 4°C by the end of this century, we should reduce emissions straight after the emissions' pick foreseen in 2015. Two years ago in Copenhagen's COP15, the governments had indicated solemnly 2°C as the limit of temperature increase beyond which the earth would be turned into a Dante's circles of hell that would sink most part of humanity into an economical and environmental apartheid. Has something changed since then? Of course not. Then how could we wait until 2020? Who should constraint major polluters to reduce their emissions? So far, the idea to leave the management of carbon emissions in the hands of market, production (or destruction?) forces and finance has prevailed, like if the financial crises had taught us no lessons on market and its only interest: profit.
The absence at the summit of the Heads of state from the major polluter and industrialised countries showed the incapacity of politics to take decisions against the big economical and financial interests, even when the fate of humanity is at stake. For one reason or another, they all wrongly privilege the economical crisis. A "leading" primitive thought that still opposes economy to ecology, ignores the limits reported by science and keeps us far away from a path that could join solutions to environmental and occupational issues. The proposals of civil society and science on energy and industrial reconversion of the production system, giving concrete answers to those two issues remained unheard. There is no step forward done, not even on concrete mitigation and adaptation mechanisms to support poorest and most vulnerable countries like the Pacific islands, threatened of disappearance by sea level rise. The USA withdrawn its promises to guarantee important annual contribution to the Green Climate Fund and there is no clue on who will contribute to the fund, how it will be distributed and how clean technologies will be transfered. We are at the mercy of the waves. To avoid to shipwrecked our own planet, we have to act fast and build a new field expressing a leading culture and practices, able to rethink development within the limits of the earth. It is not impossible. Civil society, social movements, workers, farmers and science are ready. We hope this time politics will choose to stay on the right side. This is the last opportunity.
Giuseppe De Marzo, spokesman of A Sud – www.asud.net