MONTREAL – A recent two-week United Nations Climate Change Conference held here may have reached a consensus, but it also served to highlight icy relations between the United States and other participating countries.

From November 28 to December 9, negotiators from more than 180 countries as well as more than 10,000 participants from the private and civil society sectors met in Montreal to move towards a future agreement to further curtail greenhouse gas emissions. The current protocol for curbing the emission of these gases, believed to be a contributing factor to global warming, is known as the Kyoto Protocol and expires in 2012.

THE KYOTO PROTOCOL

The United Nations formally recognized climate change as a common concern to humanity with the adoption of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992. The Convention recognized that human activities – principally the industrial emissions of so-called greenhouse gases, which include carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide among others – had an impact on climate change, but it failed to offer any real mechanism to control these activities.

Wishing to implement a pro-active pact to tackle climate change, the governments of all the industrialized countries, bar the U.S. and Australia, adopted the Kyoto Protocol on December 11, 1997, after two-and-a-half years of intense negotiations. It took effect in February 2004.

The United Nations formally recognized climate change as a common concern to humanity with the adoption of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992, and then in 1997 the governments of all the industrialized countries except the U.S. and Australia took it one step further by adopting the Kyoto Protocol.

Many question the efficacy of the Protocol, as its implementation has been limited. Only the 39 industrialized countries that ratified the Protocol are bound to its mechanisms – a complex series of measures aimed at cutting total greenhouse gas emissions by at least 5% from 1990 levels in the commitment period of 2008-2012.

In 2001, the United States, which is responsible for roughly a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions, indicated its intention not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Large developing countries such as China and India, which have growing levels of greenhouse gas emissions, are not bound by Kyoto either, as neither has opted to participate.

Further compounding the global concern over the potential harm of climate change are the recent indicators that global warming may be speeding up. Among these indicators in 2005 were a record hurricane season, increased melting of sea ice and glaciers in the Arctic, and disturbing signs that the Gulf Stream – without which northern Europe would lose its temperate climate, thus making it uninhabitable – may be beginning to shut down.

Thus, the aim of the December Montreal Conference was to not only reiterate the common concern over climate change that was expressed in the Framework Convention, but to also find a way to include additional countries in future efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

THE PROTESTS

In what has become the standard fare of high-level international economic and environmental conferences, tens of thousands of activists took to the streets in Montreal and other cities around the globe to make their views known to the decision-makers at the launch of the Climate Change Conference on December 3.

The Inuit indigenous people from Canada’s Arctic north have filed an official complaint with the Organization of American States’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights urging it to speak out against the United States for refusing to adopt compulsory limits on its greenhouse gas emissions. The Inuit claim that these emissions are contributing to rising global temperatures and the subsequent melting of polar ice caps -- leading to the disappearance of their cultural landscape and livelihood, and violating their fundamental human rights.

Among the protestors gathered in Montreal was a delegation of Inuit indigenous people from Canada’s Arctic north. In a ground-breaking case, the Inuit have recently filed an official complaint with the Organization of American States’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, urging it to speak out against the United States for refusing to adopt compulsory limits on its greenhouse gas emissions.

Many in the international science community support the Inuit claim that such emissions are in large part contributing to rising global temperatures and the subsequent melting of polar ice caps. For the Inuit people, this means the disappearance of their cultural landscape and livelihood, which they claim is a violation of their fundamental human rights under the 1948 American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and other instruments of international law.

The case of the Inuit could be a proverbial canary in the mine as a wake-up call to us all. On issues of “concern to humanity”, as the UN has phrased climate change, all of the world’s people need to be concerned. In addressing climate change, there is no such thing as partial success. Either the global community as a whole succeeds in holding climate change at bay, or it does not. The long-term environmental and economic fallout of the latter prospect would be tremendous, if not cataclysmic.

THE POLITICS

The street demonstrations notwithstanding, perhaps the most astonishing protest occurred within the Conference itself, when Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin took a bold stance against his traditional ally the United States. Martin told the international media: “To the recalcitrant nations, including the United States, I would say this: There is such a thing as a global conscience, and now is the time to listen to it.”

In the intense final two days of negotiations in Montreal, the U.S. delegation came very close to scuttling the Conference aims because it was against joining even non-binding discussions on a future pact to expand the mechanisms to limit greenhouse gases built into Kyoto.

Fortunately, due to a rallying of support from other countries’ delegations and an eleventh-hour appeal from former U.S. President Bill Clinton, the U.S. delegation came around and agreed to participate in future non-binding talks towards the creation of a post-Kyoto pact that might include the U.S. and China.

While it is very unlikely that the U.S. will agree to any mandatory emissions caps during the Bush administration, there was hope among Conference participants that a future White House might agree to implement such mechanisms. The Bush administration has traditionally spurned international pacts aimed at limiting greenhouse gas emissions claiming that such measures would lead to dire economic consequences for the U.S. The administration’s focus has instead been on pursuing new technologies purportedly aimed at curbing pollution.

The media duly noted the Conference’s coup de grâce against the U.S. negotiating position. In an editorial on the outcome of the Conference, the New York Times offered the following reflection: “The best that can be said of the recently concluded meeting on climate change in Montreal is that the countries that care about global warming did not allow the United States delegation to blow the whole conference to smithereens. Washington was intent on making sure that the conferees required no more of the United States than what it is already doing to restrain greenhouse gas emissions, which amounts to virtually nothing…The battle against global warming will never be won unless America joins it, urgently and enthusiastically. Our grandchildren will look back with anger and astonishment if we fail to do so.”

In the end, one can only hope that icy relations between governments will melt away to leave the understanding that climate change, independent of governments and politics, is increasingly affecting how life is carried out on this planet. As is evidenced by the loss of traditional Inuit habitat due to climate change in the Arctic region, the effects of global warming that are often generated in industrialized areas wind up jeopardizing life in lesser-developed areas.

While the Montreal Conference signified a step towards the inclusion of major players on the issues of climate change, we cannot allow ourselves to become complacent. Future negotiations on climate change and the mechanisms they develop for making deep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions will need to be universal and inclusive, or they will be doomed to futility.




Conor Fortune is a freelance journalist and former Rotary World Peace Fellow who currently lives in Dublin, Ireland.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Official Website

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