Cutting the use of global fuels - like those prduced by the Durban refineries here - is vital to achieving the goals set out in Paris.
“The deal alone won’t dig us out of the hole that we’re in, but it makes the sides less steep.” Veteran Greenpeace International activist Kumi Naidoo provided one of the more measured responses to the passing of the Paris Agreement, at the end of a gruelling 21st Conference of the Parties. Unlike world leaders — who resorted to hyperbolic verses welcoming the arrival of the world’s first true framework for tackling climate change — he called the agreement for what it was: a necessary stepping stone, but a timid one. “Today, the human race has joined in a common cause. The Paris Agreement is only one step on a long road and there are parts of it that frustrate, that disappoint me, but it is progress.”
Naidoo cut his teeth campaigning against oil refineries in south Durban, where communities still blame the refineries for a plethora of adverse health conditions. But their lot could change dramatically, as 195 world governments agreed to head towards a world where fossil fuels do not hold the dominance they now do. While this goal is not explicitly stated in the Paris text, it does set goals that can only be achieved if countries start to dramatically phase out fossil fuels.
The United Nations has been trying to forge this sort of alliance since 1992, when the Earth Summit was held in Rio, Brazil. It all started with great promise — in 1995 governments accepted that climate talks would be held under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This did things such as set a goal for maximum temperature increases, and set out who should do the most to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The 1999 Kyoto Protocol put this into law, but only for the countries that ratified it. A top-down climate treaty, it set specific targets for industrialised countries to reach.
But then the United States — at the time the world’s largest polluter — opted out.
The Indian and Chinese economies exploded at the same time, creating a much more complicated world. A 2009 attempt to create a global climate change agreement at COP15 in Copenhagen was destroyed by Chinese negotiators. It took COP17 in Durban to put bring mistrustful parties back to the table, where they agreed to create a new agreement by COP21.
While negotiations continued over the next four years, it was only in the second half of 2015 that countries created a draft text for a possible agreement. Most of its serious sticking points — finance, differentiation and ambition — were left until the final week of COP21, to be resolved when national ministers arrived at the negotiations. The long Paris winter nights were filled with huddled groups of negotiators and one-on-one sessions. World leaders aided the effort from back home, phoning their counterparts to thrash out problems. This produced new draft texts, and further negotiations that lasted until around 7am on the last Thursday and Friday mornings. The final text was only settled at 7.42 on Saturday morning — a day after negotiations were supposed to end.
But even then the possibility of total failure remained.
Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister and president of the climate talks, presented the final text with a warning: “Today it is a moment of truth. Before you examine the text and — I hope — we approve it, I wish to say that this agreement was necessary for the entire world, and each of our countries.”
A spelling error made by exhausted officials had the word “shall” instead of “should” in a section of text which made the conditions legally binding. This was unacceptable for the United States’ delegation, which needed an agreement it would not have to pass through its Senate. That error also gave the Nicaraguan delegation a hook to raise their objections to the weakness of the text.
It took polite threats from an unlikely US-Cuba alliance to stop that happening. As a result, Fabius was able to tap his small green gavel and formally adopt the Paris Agreement at 8.26am — to a room that erupted in wild applause. A relieved eruption of months’ worth of pent-up tension.
The agreement gives very little in the way of binding targets. Rather, it relies on creating a framework that guides countries towards lowering their greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to the worst impacts of a changing climate. At its heart is a system where each country decides how much it wants to do, through its Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC). These documents set out what countries will do in the 2020s to both mitigate and adapt to climate change. Countries are not forced to comply to the contributions, but not doing so would come at a huge political cost. Peer pressure is at the heart of the new climate regime.
Several different analyses have shown that the current intended contributions are not ambitious enough to keep this century’s global average temperature increases below 2°C. Christiana Figueres, executive director of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said: “The INDCs have the capability of limiting the forecast temperature rise to around 2.7°C by 2100, by no means enough but a lot lower than the estimated four, five, or more degrees of warming projected by many prior to the INDCs.”
At least it is a starting point. Before the Paris Agreement, countries were unilaterally acting to reduce their emissions and adapt to the changing climate. For places such as South Africa, this meant the government was taking much of the risk of backing new technology without the knowledge that everyone would join in. Now countries are all heading in the same direction, and with investments flowing into renewable technology, the sum of their efforts will necessarily improve.
It may just be enough to keep temperature increases below the catastrophic number of 2°C.
The key points
• Goal: The Paris Agreement keeps to the overarching target of keeping maximum temperature increases to 2°C, but contains an aspirational target of 1.5°C. Most scientists, however, agree that this is nearly impossible. It would require negative emissions — for humanity to suck greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.
• Implementation: Each country has already submitted its national plan for tackling climate change. These will now be reviewed every five years from 2020, with an imperative that each new plan is more ambitious than the last one.
• Finance: The $100-billion a year pledged by developed countries in 2009 now becomes a “floor”. It will be consistently increased. But there is still no method to ensure developed countries contribute to the fund, and there is grey area around whether big developing countries — China, India, Brazil and South Africa — should contribute.
• Loss and damage: This has been a sticking point for negotiations for the last two decades, with vulnerable countries demanding funding for the climate change related damage that their countries are already experiencing. Rich countries have refused, because it could be an endless cost for them. The agreement provides a compromise by recognising that loss and damage is a problem on par with adaptation and mitigation, but stops short of linking it to monetary compensation.