Michel Rocard
Michel Rocard, former Prime Minister of France and a former leader of the Socialist Party, is a member of the European Parliament.
Connie Hedegaard is EU Commissioner for Climate Action.
Achim Steiner est le directeur exécutif du Programme des Nations Unies pour l'Environnement (PNUE). Auparavant, il a exercé de hautes fonctions à la Commission mondiale des barrages puis à l'Union...
The French climatologist Hervé Le Treut is in charge of the Pierre-Simon Laplace Institute which is made up of several environmental research laboratories. He is part of the Intergovernmental Panel...
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations. It was founded on 16 October 1945 in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada. In 1951 its...
Jean François Mouhot is historian. He has a long-standing interest for environmental and energy issues, in particular for climate change. He published one book about Past Connections and Present...
Fondée en 1993 et présente dans 80 pays, Transparency International est une ONG qui lutte contre la corruption.
Fred Pearce is journalist specialized in the environment and development. He was born in the United Kingdom and studied geography in the University of Cambridge. His latest book is When the Rivers...
George Soros is Chairman of Soros Fund Management and of the Open Society Institute. Photo : © AFP PHOTO / ERIC PIERMONT
Denis Loyer is a climate adviser at the Agence française de développement, AFD. AFD is France’s development bank.
Jeff Goodell is an author and contributing editor at Rolling Stone. His book on geoengineering, How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth's Climate, will be released...
Jim Robbins is a veteran journalist based in Helena, Montana. He has written for the New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, and numerous other publications. His fifth book, The Forgotten Forest, about...
Michael D. Lemonick is the senior writer at Climate Central, a nonpartisan organization whose mission is to communicate climate science to the public. Prior to joining Climate Central, he was a...
Khadija Sharife is a South African journalist. She is also an activist and a scholar at the Centre for Civil Society (CCS) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa and a contributing author...
New Scientist was founded in 1956, this internationally-focused weekly British magazine aims at giving readers exhaustive information on recent worldwide developments in science from a scientific,...
Prem Shankar Jha is the author of Crouching Dragon, Hidden Tiger: Can China and India Dominate the West? In 1985-1987 he was a member of the energy panel of the World Commission for Environment and...
Joseph Eugene Stiglitz a reçu le prix Nobel d’économie en 2003. Il a travaillé pendant des années à la Banque mondiale. Il est aussi connu pour ses ouvragest : Quand le capitalisme perd la tête et La...
Michel Rocard, former Prime Minister of France and a former leader of the Socialist Party, is a member of the European Parliament.
Joss Garman est un militant écologique britannique. il est chargé de campagne à Greenpeace et a aussi participé à la fondation du mouvement Plane Stupid qui s'oppose à l'extension du trafic aérien....
a été conseiller éditorial de la fondation GoodPlanet.
Figure du militantisme altermondialiste et surtout anticapitaliste depuis la sortie de No Logo en 2000, Naomi Klein est une journaliste engagée. Elle concentre son travail sur les dérives du...
Jacques Mirenowicz est co-fondateur et rédacteur en chef de LaRevueDurable, revue franco-suisse de vulgarisation sur tout ce qui touche à l’écologie et au développement durable. Elle offre vise à...
Achim Steiner est le directeur exécutif du Programme des Nations Unies pour l'Environnement (PNUE). Auparavant, il a exercé de hautes fonctions à la Commission mondiale des barrages puis à l'Union...
Pavan Sukhdev est un économiste et banquier indien qui a notamment travaillé pour la banque centrale allemande en Inde. Il a été chargé par la commission européenne de diriger une étude mondiale sur...
Claus Leggewie is director of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen (KWI) and a member of the Global Change Council of Germany (WBGU). Photo : Stefan/wikipedia under Creative...
New Scientist was founded in 1956, this internationally-focused weekly British magazine aims at giving readers exhaustive information on recent worldwide developments in science from a scientific,...
New Scientist was founded in 1956, this internationally-focused weekly British magazine aims at giving readers exhaustive information on recent worldwide developments in science from a scientific,...
Professor Virgílio Viana is one of Brazil’s leading experts on forestry, environment and sustainable development. He served as Secretary of State for Environment and Sustainable Development and is...
George Monbiot is a well-known investigation reporter and columnist for the British newspaper “The Guardian” as well as a member of the BBC Wildlife magazine’s advisory board. He is also the author...
Bjørn Lomborg is an associate statistics professor at the Copenhagen Business School and former director of the Environmental Assessment in Copenhagen. He discussed his thesis of “environmental...
George Monbiot is a well-known investigation reporter and columnist for the British newspaper “The Guardian” as well as a member of the BBC Wildlife magazine’s advisory board. He is also the author...
Fred Pearce is journalist specialized in the environment and development. He was born in the United Kingdom and studied geography in the University of Cambridge. His latest book is When the Rivers...
Patrick Luganda is chairman of the Network of Climate Journalists in the Greater Horn of Africa Secretariat based in Kampala, Uganda.
Born on May 8th, 1950, in Tampico, Mexico, Angel Gurría is OECD Secretary-General, since June 2006. He was Mexico’s Minister of Foreign Affairs from December 1994 to January 1998, and Mexico’s...
Olivier BOUYER est Ingénieur du Génie Rural, des Eaux et Forêts. Il a participé à la conférence de Poznan (en 2008) avec la délégation française comme chargé de mission “effet de serre et forêt””...
Olivier Godard is currently a research director of economics at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). In 1998 he joined the econometrics laboratory, part of the École...
The UN to the Rescue on Climate Change
22/01/2010 2:41 pm
The United Nations’ General Assembly is the world’s only body in which all countries vote, with majority rule prevailing. There is no unanimity requirement or veto in the General Assembly, which might well be why it has not been called upon in the effort to fight climate change. Yet the General Assembly is the only place where obstruction by major countries – for example, by China and the United States at December’s global climate talks in Copenhagen – can be bypassed.
Of course, the UN has played a leading role on climate change before now. A “Conference of Parties” (COP) has met almost every year since the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro. These meetings are often technical and the discussions are usually among ambassadors. But sometimes their preparatory work requires decisions to be taken at the ministerial level, or even by heads of state or government. This was the case in Kyoto in 1997, and again in Copenhagen at COP15.
One might recall that many delegations arrived in Kyoto resignedly willing to accept the idea of a tax on greenhouse-gas emissions, or at least on carbon dioxide, the most commonly encountered greenhouse gas. The US delegation, dispatched by a government intent on reducing state intervention in the economy, declared itself vehemently opposed to the idea.
The US delegation suggested a totally different scheme from the one being discussed. In the US scheme, the volume of emissions would be subject to permits or quotas, which could be traded in a market established for that purpose.
In the end, that scheme was chosen in Kyoto with the hope that the US, which had proposed it, would then ratify it. China and India were absent at the time, and Russia was hostile to the idea. But the US refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.
The European Union was the only group of nations that seriously considered implementing it. A European quota system, limited to electricity producers and materials manufacturers, the two major sources of emissions, has been in place since 2005.
The COP15 conference in Copenhagen was supposed to forge a successor treaty that would take effect when the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. But four days of discussion among world leaders resulted in a fiasco. A four-page document was vaguely approved by acclamation but not submitted to a vote. It expressed the hope that international action will aim at limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius in the course of the twenty-first century, but it says nothing about how to achieve this – no commitments on the quantity of emissions, and no system for global measurement or supervision.
Such a failure is extremely harmful. With no government commitments, there can be no attempt to limit carbon emissions effectively, which implies that when the world does begin to take action, it will be that much more difficult to slow the pace of climate change and mitigate its effects. Moreover, Europe has been left uncertain about its own system of quotas, which has not functioned particularly well in the first place.
More than half of the 43 members of the Association of Small Island States believe that the decision to do nothing, to let ocean waters rise, can be considered tantamount to approval of murder. The smallest among them, Tuvalu, with 11,000 inhabitants, is already searching for a place to evacuate its citizens when their island is submerged. More than half of Bangladesh’s territory, home to 100 million inhabitants, is threatened by flooding, as is the Netherlands, with 16 million people, for a quarter of its territory.
Most of the potential climate refugees will end up in huge zones of increasing dryness – the Middle East, the Mediterranean region, central China, and the US. Some predict that this migration will take place as soon as the second half of this century.
Given the scale of the looming catastrophe, the world cannot afford to leave things as they are. Of course, the process has not stopped. Conferences on climate change will still be held. But the next one will probably lead to a serious settling of scores. Indeed, people and governments need to express their anger at the fact that no binding agreement was reached in Copenhagen, despite the willingness of many of those who were present.
Fortunately, enough was accomplished in Copenhagen to re-boot the process. But that re-boot must start now, and the UN, specifically the General Assembly, is the place to begin. Many commentators have condemned the UN for the failure in Copenhagen. But that is a misreading of what happened. The UN was only the tour operator in Copenhagen. It supplied logistics, interpreters, and an address book. Its steering bodies did not function, because they were not called upon during the talks.
It is thus time to make real use of the UN, to call upon the General Assembly to take the lead. The UN was not responsible for the failure in Copenhagen, and it should not act as if it was. It must now use its power as the world’s parliament to overcome the obstructions of the few.
Copenhague : Demi succès ou catastrophe ? Par Michel Rocard
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010.
www.project-syndicate.org
Signaler un abus
