SPERI spotlight on the UN climate summit IV

Like Fiji’s experience in the Rugby World Cup, the Pacific island states drew a ‘tough pool’ in their first step on the road to global negotiations on climate change in Paris.

In order to forge a Pacific regional position, they have had to ‘negotiate’ with two Annex 1 states (OECD), which are among the world’s biggest carbon emitters per capita among the industrialised states.  This is because, for historical reasons, Australia and New Zealand are members of the Pacific Islands Forum.  Forum decisions are made by consensus, which means that Australia and New Zealand have an effective veto on the setting of an ambitious mitigation target as part of any Pacific Islands Forum declaration on climate change action.  What’s more, they have exercised this veto several times over the past twenty years, most notably prior to COP 15 in Copenhagen.

The key summit for negotiating the Pacific island position was held in Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea in September.  The Australian and New Zealand leaders made it very clear before they left for the meeting that they had already announced what they considered to be ambitious emissions targets and that to shift any further would impact negatively on their economies.

The problem is that these targets were anything but ambitious in terms of the level required to make a serious difference on global warming.  For example, the Australian Government emission target of 26–28 per cent is well below the 40–60 per cent target recommended by its own Climate Change Authority as necessary to keep warming below 2 degrees. Indeed, the Chairman of the UK’s Committee on Climate Change, John Gummer, labelled Australia’s targets ‘sad’ and a ‘disgrace’.  He has argued that ‘Australia is going to go to the Paris talks with one of the least ambitious targets’.

Prior to the Moresby meeting, the Pacific island leaders had made it very clear in a series of meetings without Australia and New Zealand present that their shared position was for an uncompromising demand for a global warming limit of 1.5 degrees over pre-industrial levels.  The most prominent of these meetings was a three-day meeting of the Pacific Islands Development Forum in Suva in August that culminated in the Suva Declaration on Climate Change.  This also called for 5-yearly reviews of mitigation targets to adapt to changing science; ‘new, additional, adequate, and predictable’ climate finance; special financial assistance for those already ‘experiencing existential threats from climate change’; and loss and damage as a stand-alone section in the Paris Agreement.

There was no way the Moresby meeting could bridge such irreconcilable differences between Australia and New Zealand, on the one hand, and the Pacific island states, on the other.  Although the eventual Pacific Islands Forum Declaration on Climate Action attempted to paper over the differences with clever ambiguity, the bottom line is that the Declaration does not represent the shared position of the Pacific island states.  It acknowledges the threat posed to low-lying island states if warming goes above 1.5 degrees, but it does not call for this to be the threshold commitment in the Paris Agreement.  Rather, it endorses ‘the global temperature goal established at the Lima COP’ in 2014.  This was not 1.5; it was ‘1.5 or 2’.  Nor does the Declaration call for regular (5-yearly) review of emission targets to allow for more ambitious efforts to develop over time.  It supports loss and damage but only as part of the ‘outcomes’, not as part of the Agreement itself.  Finally, although it supports access to climate finance, it is not ‘new, additional, and predictable’ climate finance.