Lowering expectations in Lima

We in Pakistan desperately need a comprehensive response to climate change

The year 2014 is currently on track to becoming one of the hottest years on record — and quite possibly the hottest of them all, according to the World Meteorological Organisation. It has released this information at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s annual round of negotiations, currently being held in Lima, Peru. The Lima Climate Change Conference is expected to approve the first drafts of the elements of the global agreement to be finalised at the Paris conference next year. The world is expected to reach a global climate deal to curb carbon emissions at Paris in 2015.

While the two-week long conference is underway in Lima, the Heinrich Boll Foundation organised a round-table dialogue on “Climate Change and Security” in Islamabad where a number of top climate experts assembled. The audience was told how climate change is now a threat to international peace and security. While the dialogue focused on the dire predictions for national security, given future conflicts over food and water and even transboundary migration due to climate change, the Lima conference was also highlighted.

Former diplomat Shafqat Kakakhel explained, “There has been a recession of political will in the developed world and a withdrawal of the rich countries from the commitments they have made in the past”. This does not bode well for the outcome in Lima. Instead of legally binding commitments, the world is now following the ‘buffet approach’ advocated by the US in which Intended Nationally Determined Actions are to be put on the table and then tabulated. They will fall far short of the kind of cuts on emissions needed and recommended by the scientific community. In fact, there seems to be little chance of ensuring the globally agreed goal of less than two degrees Celsius warming by the end of the century. Lima is probably our last chance to get an effective global climate deal, which is fair for developing countries that are being asked to do more by the rich countries that don’t want to take responsibility for climate change.

Pakistan, which played a major role in the both the 1992 and 2007 conferences as chair of the G-77 group of developing countries (in fact both times saving the conferences from collapse), has sent just a handful of officials to Lima this year. The PML-N government has devolved the climate change ministry to a division and placed the National Climate Change Policy on the back burner; clearly it is not a priority for it. In Lima, the Pakistani delegation will be focusing on the loss and damage mechanism (given our annual monsoon flooding) and on the definition of vulnerability. But as Kakakhel points out, “There is no institutional mechanism to interact at the global level so we will miss the bus for future funding. I fear that Pakistan will be left out in the cold when the global architecture (for the Green Climate Fund, etc) is put in place.” Climate change, he says, must not be treated as a sectoral issue; it is a multi-dimensional topic and an overarching institutional framework is needed for both policymaking and implementation. Even Bangladesh has mainstreamed climate change into national policy; it has a whole government approach to climate change all across society. We in Pakistan desperately need this kind of comprehensive response to climate change.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 12^th,  2014.

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