Heat without Warmth

Unless there occurs a miracle of environmental diplomacy and a magic wand that will strip the US of its adamancy, the sixth session of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC-COP6), or the climate change conference, at The Hague is all set to collapse, postponing once again the evolution of a practical framework and agenda for making the Kyoto treaty workable. Although not surprising, this failure to hammer out an agreement on quotas, deadlines and the means to achieve them will have a devastating effect on the rudimentary efforts to regulate climate change. The key unresolved issues remain political, rather than technical, premised as they are on the need for a change in global consumption and therefore production patterns.

The two intervening years since the Kyoto Convention was hammered out have seen a series of structured negotiations which were meant to produce a usable negotiating text for COP6. However, the deliberations in September at the 13th session of the subsidiary bodies (SB13), despite long hours of exchanges, could only come up with a text riddled with square brackets – that is, issues on which no agreement could be reached. While of course the object of this meeting of over 2,000 participants was not to arrive at a final resolution of differences among the parties to the Kyoto Convention, that none of the draft conclusions – on mechanisms, compliance, policies and measures, capacity building , technology transfer, assessment of adverse effects, guidelines on information and documentation and especially land use, land use change and forestry – was anywhere near being workable documents was disappointing. Nevertheless the large mass of non-governmental organisations working closely on this issue continued to hope that The Hague meeting would produce some movement.