Climate negotiations: UN can do the job - if used well

Michael Zammit Cutajar, who was Chair of the key UN negotiating group at Copenhagen seeking a new global climate agreement involving the US and China, responds to Carbon Positive's December 24 editorial Lessons from Copenhagen: Has the UN played its last card?, arguing that the UN is the right instrument for global climate action - if used well...

Looking back on Copenhagen, commentators have questioned whether the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) has the capacity to carry such a complex negotiation forward. Arguments have been advanced for shifting the action into smaller forums, such as the G20 or the Major Economies Forum. These are easy but risky arguments.

Imagine their being advanced in the 1980s: they could have resulted in negotiations on climate change being undertaken in the OECD, with China on the outside. A similar risk would apply today to Africa, which is in aggregate a potential "major emitter" of the future.

We now have a universal instrument to address a quintessentially global challenge. As has been proven, action in smaller and specialized forums can contribute to broader outcomes. But the argument for a global framework remains. We need a forum that contains the interests of the countries and communities whose very survival is at risk from climate change, as well as the interests of countries that are "minor emitters" and want to stay that way as they prosper. We also need a common framework of accountability and accounting rules, all the more so as market mechanisms take root and spread.

The instrument at our disposal took a beating in Copenhagen. Participants and analysts have perceived different signs of dysfunction from their respective standpoints:

* the decision of the Conference President to convene the back-room negotiation which produced the Accord, without seeking the authority of the Conference;
* the announcement by a departing President of a deal with a handful of countries before the plenary Conference had got wind of it; and
* the ability of another handful to block the adoption of the Accord by the plenary.

Some felt that the event had been oversold and suffered from an excess of celebrity. These are understandable observations. The point, though, is that this same instrument has been used to good effect in the past, even to the extent of circumventing final resistance to landmark decisions by handfuls of countries.

Of course, all that can be done to improve the instrument must be done. Agreement on voting rules for all categories of decisions - substantive and financial - is overdue. But what is needed above all is the political and procedural skill to use the instrument well. As the proverb goes: A good workman does not blame his tools.

Michael Zammit Cutajar chaired the Ad Hoc Working Groups on Long-term Cooperative Action (2009) and on the Kyoto Protocol (2006). He was the first Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC (1995-2002). These views are personal.

Carbonpositive 3.3.2010

http://www.carbonpositive.net/viewarticle.aspx?articleID=1907

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Climate accord: From Copenhagen to Cancún
Michael Zammit Cutajar assesses negotiating prospects in 2010 in the lead up to the next UN climate conference in Mexico, arguing that it may not be wise to try and turn the Copenhagen Accord into a binding treaty this year.