We have been told, by more than one speaker of very different viewpoints about climate change, that nothing less than the future of the planet will be negotiated in Copenhagen. Expectations had been lowered by the assurance that no legally binding agreement would result from the negotiations. Instead, President Barack Obama announced there would be a “political agreement,” that would frame the terms of a legally binding agreement to be finalized next year in Mexico City. But the “Danish text,” leaked to The Guardian, provoked such outrage among developing countries that it has been withdrawn, at least procedurally, as a basis for any discussion towards negotiations. The negotiations were suspended today, December 14, but then renewed. The Climate Action Network reportedly "awarded" the United States its first "Fossil Award" for bad behavior after it announced that it would never sign the Kyoto Protocol that would bind it to a greenhouse gas reduction mandate. Instead the U.S. will attempt to make a global carbon emissions market the primary means to allow it to meet GHG-reduction targets. Such a market includes the buying of carbon offset credits at a cheap price in developing countries.
More officials have arrived to negotiate and NGOs have arrived to participate in side events in the gargantuan Bella Center, the site of the negotiations. The line of those waiting with letters of acceptance and passports in hand waited in vain for hours today. Those IATP staff who had managed to register before the “badge making machine had broken” (the security office explanation) called from inside the Bella Center to arrange meetings for what we hope will be a more logistically successful tomorrow. But right now rumors abound and we feel eyeless in Copenhagen, as far as the Bella Center is concerned.
But however frustrating the registration process, we have been able to learn and inform about what IATP is doing on climate change. From our participation in Agriculture and Rural Development Day (www.agricultureday.org), we learned that much bigger institutions than IATP were surprised at the exclusion of agriculture, until now, in the negotiations. ARDD delivered the “messages” gathered from four Roundtable discussions, characterized by one speaker as “no agriculture, no deal.” Since the United States and the European Union plan to “reduce” more than half of their GHG emissions by buying much cheaper offset credits based on GHG reductions from agriculture and forestry practices, it is a little more than bizarre that agriculture has not had a working group in the negotiations.
Agriculture Day plenary speakers, including Kanayo Nwanze, the President of the International Foundation for Development, insisted that the more than two billion small land holding farmers affected by climate change would feel failure in Copenhagen in their stomachs before anybody else. In sub-Saharan African alone, 75-250 million people could be added to the total number of more than a billion food insecure peoples, as the natural resources for agriculture are damaged by climate change.
I participated in the round table on “Potential benefits of emissions trading for small [land] holder farmers.” What several speakers and participants conveyed was just how little was known about how to verify that offset projects reduced GHGs. Since carbon emissions trading had been sold to farmers as a solid income stream ($40 billion a year in offset sales by 2020, according to the World Bank), more than one of them was upset to find out that stringent verification would be required for their projects to be certified as having reduced GHGs. For example, according to the International Panel on Climate Change, the science on carbon sequestration (usually by returning emissions to the ground) is ambiguous as to whether GHGs are reduced. Managing livestock diets to reduce methane emissions is even more unproven. In light of the science based doubt about agricultural offsets, one participant suggested that agricultural practices, rather than results, be certified as the basis for offset credits in carbon trading. The suggestion was met with scientific disdain. If the scientists are so unclear about the feasibility of basing emissions trading on verifying offset GHG reductions, the terms for doing so in the climate change negotiations will only be more contentious.
I had ten minutes in the “Ideas Marketplace” to summarize an IATP webinar on carbon trading and U.S. climate change legislation. The poster that I used, graduate student style, explained how the present terms of U.S. legislation could create extreme carbon price volatility that would impede not only the rate of investment return analysis to invest in a low carbon economy, but would exacerbate agricultural futures prices. When the $3 trillion carbon derivates market projected for 2020 is bundled into commodity index funds, the effect is likely to be similar to how oil future prices drove agricultural futures prices up and down in 2007-2008. Discussion was lively, so maybe we opened up the eyes of a few people who otherwise might have assumed that carbon markets would be an unqualified benefit for farmers. Tomorrow we’ll try to open a few more eyes on other agriculture and climate change topics.
