RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—Three issues dominated the United Nations Copenhagen Climate Conference during the last two weeks: funding, forest preservation, and emission reductions. Despite a lack of resolution on the latter, there has been some success on the first two.
Funding
A climate fund is essential to achieving a new global compact to control climate change. Funds are needed to support nascent industries and to launch clean technologies into the global marketplace. While the pledged amount of $10 billion annually for the next three years is insufficient, at least the principle of a fund has been established. The climate fund envisioned at the conference will include financing for adaptation, mitigation (climate stabilization and clean-technology transfer), and forest preservation. Though much, much more funding is needed—hundreds of billions of dollars a year for several decades, according to leading energy experts, for the clean-energy transformation alone—there is now a platform for ratcheting up the amount (rapidly, we can hope, as nations and organizations maintain pressure). Hillary Clinton’s Dec 17 speech included the U.S. goal of working with other nations to jointly mobilize $100 billion a year by 2020 to address the climate-change needs of developing countries.
The question to follow is, what's the best way to raise these funds from international sources, and not tax already-strained national budgets? The amount, sources, and allocation procedures will be on the docket for the 2010-11 climate discussions.
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Forests
A second accomplishment of the Copenhagen conference: The principles for a framework have been put forward for Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD). Threats of further deforestation—including the use of trees for biofuels and in large-scale bioenergy power plants—loom large. We cannot afford any further clear-cutting of forests. Adequate screening of energy solutions is needed so we can avoid those measures that come with unintended consequences that render them unsustainable. Funds are also needed here, and sources other than the projected proceeds from an international cap-and-trade program are needed now.
Accounting measures need to be crafted, but REDD provides a necessary first step toward a larger project: regreening the earth to draw down billions of tons of atmospheric CO2 in the coming decades, an idea proposed by ecologist Thomas Lovejoy, President of the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, and reinforced by George Woodwell of the Woods Hole Research Center.
Emission Reductions
As for the most difficult issue, carbon emission targets, that subject was essentially tabled. China and India’s proposal of using carbon intensity (carbon emissions per GDP output), which has not been entered into the international arena, may offer an equitable way forward for many nations. Creative thinking is needed to set goals for the first several years after the Kyoto agreement's expiration in 2012. Meanwhile, to achieve progress within nations, two of the main governmental financial instruments—subsidies and tax structures—must be repurposed to catapult progress in all nations. In the U.S., President Obama must employ the full strength of his administrative prerogatives, given congressional intransigence.
The most disturbing aspect of the Copenhagen Climate Conference is the bitter feeling that many participants left with. Global consensus around a framework for solving the climate-change problem is still shaky and halting. All parties—governments, civil society, business, and international organizations—must be at the table to make this project work, and venue and accommodation capacity must be addressed in preparation for the upcoming 2010 talks in Mexico City.
Global governance is in its infancy. To endure the coming climate, achieve the clean-energy transformation, and preserve the world’s forests, international agreements must ultimately realign the rules of commerce, financial incentives, and institutions. We have much to learn from the European Union of 27 nations concerning which powers to centralize versus which are to be retained by sovereign nations. But the 2009 UN Copenhagen Climate Conference is a step—halting, lurching, for sure—toward the enhanced global governance we need to achieve a sustainable solution to the climate-change crisis. Essential principles and measures towards that goal have begun to take shape.
Paul R. Epstein, MD, MPH is associate director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA.