With so many delegations from all around the world present in the conferences, it will be really hard for every single of them to voice their own concerns. Since conducting negotiations among so many individuals is almost impossible, most countries tend to form coalitions to share information and have a representative to present their ideas. This is a great way for those small countries which do not hold much power to let their voice be heard.
The Group of 77 was founded in 1964. It was originally composed of seventy seven developing countries, but the number grew bigger. It was founded under the purpose of promoting communication between the north and the south, and safeguarding developing countries’ interests. Even though China only has an associate membership, it supports other members’ reasonable and justicial requests. China and the group have been maintaining a favorable partnership and that is where the name of “the Group of 77 and China” came from. It is the largest intergovernmental coalition recognized by United Nations. The group’s members all have very diversed backgrounds such as being small islands, least developed countries, and very large nations. So what makes them group together and share mutual recognitions? Because they share the same desire to:
– extricate themselves out of poverty
– achieve sustained economic development
– gain power and influence
Since all the members in the group are developing countries, it will be extremely hard for them to overcome serious climate change problems once they happen. As for putting out efforts to prevent climate change, they have limited ability to offer because of technological and capital contraints. The G-77 and China thinks developed countries have the obligation to provide developing countries with financial and technological assistance to help them find out a way to be sustainable and to be able to achieve economic growth at the same time. They strongly believe that no plan or strategy would be affective if developing countries could not have access to enough financial and technological aid. But the lack of fulfillment by developed countries concered the G-77 and China and made it present the issue during the UNFCCC’s Bali conference. With developing countries’ persistence, all the parties finally achieved unanimous agreement to provide necessary assistance to developing countries.
The outcome of developing countries forming huge coalition and having the assistance from China turned out to be prominent because they have more power and influence in discussing global issues. But there are definitely problems existed such as some tiny delegations being unable to actively participate in the negotiations.
If we do not distinguish by terrains, we can say that at the moment, poor people in developing countries and the least developed countries are the ones who are suffering from climate change the most and they cannot help it. Take developing country Pakistan for example, its greehouse gas emission only counts for 0.43% of the world’s total, but low emission does not change its vulnerable condition when it comes to climate change. The difference between wealthy and poor people is the ability of mobilizing resources. As the climate change is bringing more disastrous and extreme weather conditions, wealthy people in developed countries will be able to handle it because of having abundant capital and technological resources while poor people cannot do anything about it. That is why developing countries proposed the idea of having shared but differentiated responsibilities. Only in this way can developing countries still maintain the standard quality of living, and at the same time, they can try to ameliorate the climate change effects.
Developing countries should let their voice and justicial proposals be heard in COP15 taking place this December in Copenhagen. This might be hard for one single developing country, but by uniting, it makes a huge difference.
Works Cited
Regime Participants
Xinhua News
Tags: climate change, coalitions, COP15 Resources
