Impact of Climate Change on Arab Countries - (IPCC) - Working ...

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CHAPTER 11
INTERNATIONAL NEGOTIATIONS FOR A POST-KYOTO REGIME
I. INTRODUCTION
Addressing climate change is one <strong>of</strong> humanity’s
most pressing environmental challenges, requiring
urgent and concerted action. It is a complex,
long-term problem, more than 200 years in the
making. It is ubiquitous - there are few human
activities that do not directly or indirectly contribute
to it or are not affected by its impacts.
Emissions anywhere cause warming everywhere;
mitigation action anywhere helps everywhere
also. Postponing mitigation action increases
both damage costs and the costs <strong>of</strong> action that
will have to be taken. While piecemeal efforts
help, the scale <strong>of</strong> response required for an ultimate
solution is so large that widespread collective
action is essential.
This chapter is written with the target <strong>of</strong> giving
the Arab negotiators as clear as possible a picture
<strong>of</strong> what is happening and is likely to happen in
the global negotiations <strong>of</strong> the post-Kyoto agreement,
to help them take, if possible, unified positions
at the Copenhagen negotiations.
II. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
We owe the discovery that greenhouse gases
block infrared radiation to the Irish-British scientist
John Tyndall. In 1859, he was the first to
suggest that changes in their atmospheric concentrations
could lead to changes in climate. The
remarkably original Swedish scientist Svante
Arrhenius, who won the Nobel Prize for
Chemistry in 1903, was the first to publish (in
1896) estimates <strong>of</strong> how much increasing levels <strong>of</strong>
atmospheric carbon dioxide would warm the
atmosphere. He also developed a theory to
explain earth’s ice ages and other climatic
changes.
For the next 60 years or so, the significance <strong>of</strong>
Arrhenius’s calculations remained by and large
unrecognized. Painstaking scientific work for
three decades and several scientific assessments
led to the October 1985 International
Conference on the Assessment <strong>of</strong> the Role <strong>of</strong>
Carbon Dioxide and Other Greenhouse Gases in
Climatic Variations and Associated <strong>Impact</strong>s,
organized by the International Council <strong>of</strong>
Scientific Unions, the World Meteorological
Organization (WMO), and the United Nations
Environment Programme (UNEP) at Villach,
Austria. This conference reiterated the consensus
amongst scientists about the inevitability <strong>of</strong> global
warming. The discovery that other trace gases
add to the warming caused by carbon dioxide
meant that significant changes could be expected
within a lifetime rather than in some distant
future. Abandoning their characteristic caution,
scientists from 29 countries at this conference
concluded that “human releases <strong>of</strong> greenhouse
gases could lead in the first half <strong>of</strong> the 21 st century
to a rise <strong>of</strong> global temperature ... greater than
any in man’s history”. They also urged ‘active
collaboration between scientists and policymakers
to explore the effectiveness <strong>of</strong> alternative policies
and adjustments.’
WMO and UNEP decided in 1988 to establish
the Intergovernmental Panel on <strong>Climate</strong> <strong>Change</strong>
(IPCC), as a joint program to provide policy-relevant
but not policy-prescriptive advice. The
IPCC published its first report two years later in
1990, establishing that emissions <strong>of</strong> greenhouse
gases resulting from human activities were substantially
increasing their atmospheric concentrations
and that under a business-as-usual scenario,
the 21st century would witness an increase in
global mean temperature greater than any seen in
the past 10,000 years. This Assessment strongly
supported the recommendation <strong>of</strong> the 1988
International <strong>Climate</strong> Conference to the UN
General Assembly to negotiate a convention to
deal globally with the problem <strong>of</strong> climate change.
The UN negotiating committee was established
by the General Assembly in December 1990.
This committee negotiated the UN Framework
Convention on <strong>Climate</strong> <strong>Change</strong> (UNFCCC).
More than 140 countries with differing interests
participated in 16 months <strong>of</strong> difficult negotiations.
It was signed by 154 heads <strong>of</strong> states, governments
and delegations at the Earth Summit in
Rio in 1992, including the United States, and
entered into force in 1994. To date, 189 countries
have ratified the Convention.
The framework convention does not mandate
specific reductions in greenhouse gases-it only
obliges the industrialized countries to ‘adopt
national policies and take corresponding measures’
with the ‘aim <strong>of</strong> returning’ emissions by
2000 to their 1990 levels. In the negotiations
leading to the convention, developing countries
argued, and rightly so, that the primary responsi-