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Dickinson to Durban » Climate Change, Mosaic Action » What got done?

What got done?

September 21st, 2011 | 4 Comments

Both the Copenhagen Accord and the Cancun Agreements, products of COP15 and COP16 respectively, are important documents in climate change negotiations.  They are lacking though.  Neither at any point have anything about what countries need to do to keep the global average temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius.  Each document, in its own right, provides some good steps in helping the climate change negotiations move forward, providing different mechanisms to allot financial support and information transfer between the Parties to the Conference.  I understand the need for these mechanisms and they are good things to have come out of the past two Conferences.   These financial and other mechanisms can only help the future Conference of the Parties move forward and make some kind of significant move in addressing climate change.  Again, they do not provide any significant agreement to reduce greenhouse gasses.

I believe that there are a few reasons that neither of these documents have asked the Parties to the Conference to commit to a groups, the Parties would not agree to this.  If at the end of these Conferences they do not produce at least some kind of agreement, with or without reductions, it becomes a waste of time money and resources.  But if they have some kind of document at the end that makes it look like something really happened then they can they were successful.  The next reason being that if they are unable to get some sort of agreement, it becomes a public embarrassment.  Though to some extent, this may seem trivial,  a lack of an agreement will reflect poorly on the heads of Countries and will have political (electoral) repercussions.   measurable reduction in GHG emissions.  The first and foremost being that if they were to ask for reduction from any one or multiple

Overall, I will state that I believe these two documents, the Copenhagen Accord and Cancun Agreement, to be huge flops.  For any future agreements, accord, protocols, etc., to be successful a commitment from all Parties to make a significant and hard reduction in GHG emissions.  For that to happen, the first step is for the Annex 1 counties, by which I am primarily referring to the US, need to remove the head from there rather large a$$ and stop waiting for everyone else to do something.

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4 Responses to "What got done?"

  1. Emily Bowie says:
    September 21, 2011 at 2:53 am

    I agree. I think a lot of the time these conferences produce agreements that have no means of holding countries accountable for their commitments because they just want to be able to produce something to avoid “public embarrassment” as you said.

    Also, nice picture. I very much approve.

    Reply
  2. Maggie Rees says:
    September 21, 2011 at 4:15 am

    Do you think there will be high expectations for Durban? Will the COP17 negotiations be any different? I agree that these are often a waste of resources, so hopefully something is actually accomplished in December.

    Reply
  3. Sam Parker says:
    September 21, 2011 at 3:21 pm

    To be honest, I don’t expect much to come out of Durban. I don’t believe that anyone is ready to make a commitment at this time, and without a commitment nothing will get done in terms of mitigation. This is why I think that to really do anything about climate change mitigation there needs to be a movement from the people.

    Reply
  4. Claire says:
    October 8, 2011 at 4:34 pm

    I always feel like a cop-out when I say that more disasters need to hit the “first world” or the “global North” in order for any of the Annex 1 countries to make a committment. But it really seems that way…

    Reply

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