Islands Business - Commentary: CLIMATE CHANGE --A POLITICAL FIREWALK?

Adam Delaney
The last time I wrote about global climate change and sea-level rise in this magazine, I mentioned how the Pacific region needed a media cacophony, including in Australia and New Zealand on the issue, as was the case on anti-Whaling. Question is: How do you get this issue to become a political firewalk in the region?
We got that answer, thanks in large part, to an ‘assessment’ produced by the authoritative Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and released in early February, in France.

Strategising... former PNG Ambassador to Belgium and Luxembourg, Peter Tsiamalili (left) and Adam Delaney during the first UN Conference on Climate Change in Berlin, Germany.

The IPCC, established by the World Meteorological Organisation and the United Nations Environment Programme, is a unified body of over 500 world scientists/researchers and is well recognised for its science-based authority in understanding the Earth’s atmospheric changes and global warming.
With this credence, surely the panel can make a bold declaration on what’s happening to the world’s climate without fear or favour. But is its Fourth Assessment Report (FAR) really that far-reaching and such a secret after all? Hardly. The debate on the earth’s climate behaviour is as old as Captain Cook ‘discovering’ Australia.
For a start, the latest ‘assessment’ wasn’t even the full picture, just a ‘Reader’s Digest’ format for policy-makers.
The comprehensive report has yet to be issued but I am not holding my breath for it. The drama that has been created in the media merely reaffirms how science and policy continue to be at loggerheads in concluding what options countries should take to address climate change under international law.
The Pacific Islands Forum, which includes Australia, New Zealand and 14 Pacific Islands Countries as a group, is stuck in this quagmire. Australia is the only country in the group that has not ratified the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Questions will still be raised on whether the latest scientific finding on global temperatures by the panel is definitive and undisputed.
Is there time to wait for something really conclusive? The plethora of right wing versus left wing arguments on the impact of human activities on global warming reminds me of a remark by US Secretary of State, Condolleza Rice, that evidence of Saddam’s ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ may well be presented by a mushroom cloud! The logic: why wait, pre-empt, act.
Not everyone will wear a badge of the IPCC chairman’s picture, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the pro-oil had lobbied intensely during the panel’s Working Group deliberations for something indispensable to be said about the economic anxieties of carbon dioxide reductions on those countries that ‘depend’ on exports. We’ve got to live with it. Some may not like what the IPCC has said, but its reputation has generated a resounding movement from all corners of the globe and finally, it’s big, dominating talk in Canberra. The Australian Opposition’s Shadow Environment Minister, Peter Garrett, is playing the IPCC trump card and it seems to be working in the polls.
The effect of intense pressure for government to accept the IPCC assessment has been obvious domestically in Australia.
As the Shadow Minister said on Australia’s Channel Ten television station recently, the government is now taking heed and listening to the polls, rather than having listened to the world community on climate change.
The IPCC’s assertion on linkages between man and climate has invigorated firestorm debates. Timing of the IPCC announcement suggests it was perfectly launched, coincidentally, whilst natural calamities such as Australia’s drought, cyclones and floods are occurring globally.
Everyone with an interest in the environment is comparing everything to just about everything; dying cattle in drought-stricken plains, El Nino, melting ice-caps, hurricanes, industrialisation, coral bleaching, chills in California, warming and more warming, and yes bad land management practices too.

Worldwide publicity a success
The worldwide publicity over the latest IPCC ‘assessment’ has been a resounding success in elevating the need for political commitment and leadership to address climate change. It’s unstoppable.
Unlike previous debates on the issues, where sceptics saw the Kyoto Protocol as a 17th century plague, and the narratives on global warming have been, at best, pesky, large international firms are now looking at market mechanisms to deal with the costs, i.e. caps on emissions of greenhouse gases and trade in carbon credits.
Importantly, the IPCC’s ‘assessment’ has shifted the political dialogue in Australia on ‘nuclear,’ as an alternative energy source to mitigate the negative impacts of climate change, to a Hollywood-like frenzy on why some governments really didn’t take climate change issues to be of any political significance (forget the environment). Nuclear energy, for now, has been elbowed to a peripheral life-cycle and its advocates are fighting to bring it back into the limelight.
So what was the secret gem that the IPCC knew all along? Notwithstanding the IPCC’s global standing, its latest ‘assessment’ states a conditional ambiguity that contributes marginally from a scientific point of view to any previous global debate about the relationship between climate and mankind’s interference.
After a long deliberation and painful harmonisation of methodology, the panel has unequivocally declared that if nothing much is done, mankind has to take the blame for future global warming and widespread natural disasters due to, inter alia, consumption of greenhouse gas, particularly carbon dioxide. So is the latest cacophony of climate change ‘scaremongers’ an exaggeration of what we sort of knew since the World Climate Conference in 1979 under the WMO?
The IPCC’s new and revolutionary proclamation is that it is ‘very likely’ that mankind is responsible for the changes we are seeing in climates around the world, both the warming of the ice caps and the cooling of different Oceans. This is the secret discovery. Given the politics within the IPCC, this verdict may not be exact, but it has had the effect pro-Kyoto countries wanted.
It wouldn’t matter if the verdict had been “very, in posse, likely.” The IPCC has spoken, albeit, politically. The Tribal Council wants action and punishment. Someone has to be removed and in politics this spells self-interest.
IPCC’s ‘credibility’ is beating the war drums to sound out the sceptics. But its statement is no more powerful to justify action, now that science has improved beyond reasonable doubt, than the combined effect of its last three assessment reports. Back then, in 1990 and 1996, the IPCC and policy-makers agreed that we needed to take a ‘precautionary approach.’ Again, the IPCC is saying that it is not unlikely that humans have no significant part in the equation.
It wouldn’t have mattered if it had said that it’s ‘99% or 92.5% likely’ that mankind has anything to do with the mess. Hell no, because so much global hype was already created by British scientists (Stern Report) in support of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s climate policy in the lead up to, and during past G8 Summits (powerful, industrial nations). More recently, the same advocacy was relentlessly pushed by former US Vice President, Al Gore, during his international media blitz on his movie: “An Inconvenient Truth.” The IPCC can’t be simply brushed aside so, governments in the West are trying hard to keep up appearances with shades of Green in their backbone.
Since the first world gatherings of meteorological experts and climatologists in the late 1970s, preceding the Earth Summit in 1992 where the UNFCCC was born, numerous conclusions have been pronounced by global scientists, experts, Dr David Suzuki, heck even the Secretary-General of the United Nations, for concerted, international action to stabilise the world’s atmosphere and prevent further environmental damage.
The science wasn’t exact then, as it is now. It didn’t really ‘prove’ too much, but the world consensus then, as it is now, was that mankind was a big culprit, creating the greenhouse effect by excessive historical industrialisation and carbon consumption from e.g. households, utilities, cars, industry and deforestation.

Climate changed influenced by man
The IPCC report just re-confirms the consensus from past years and the scientific evidence that climate change is influenced by man has thus brought a level of certainty.
The vulnerability of the Pacific Islands Countries (PICs), while well known and recognised by the IPCC, must now be revisited in light of this report in order to accelerate action on mitigation and adaptation. Catastrophic impacts in the Pacific region could mean the destruction of entire countries, with the loss of land, language, culture and biodiversity, indeed, a tremendous loss to humanity.
Serious attention is needed to find practical means to reduce emissions and to address adaptation.
The Secretariat of the Pacific Regional environmental Programme (SPREP) is doing work to respond to the report accordingly. SPREP works with the PICs to respond to their concerns and to find ways and means to optimise participation of these islands delegates in international action. SPREP is working with the UNFCCC Secretariat to convene a Pacific and Indian Ocean Workshop on Adaptation to climate change to follow a similar exercise for the Caribbean and Atlantic Small Islands Developing States.
The workshop will focus on how to improve adaptation implementation, financing of adaptation and improved vulnerability and adaptation assessments. According to SPREP, it will continue to work in support of the PICs to seek technical and financial support for responding to climate change, to carry out research and continue to bring climate change information to the PICs.
Scientists cautioned some 30 years ago that cows, goats and sheep were also contributing to gas emissions, by simply being animals. No matter where the emissions are coming from, the global policy, despite the scientific uncertainties, is overwhelming.
Any Greenhouse Gas (GHG) reduction target must look awfully redundant now in the face of the gospel from the IPCC that, warming will cause sea levels to rise by between 28cm and 58cm this century, with bigger rises possible if Greenland and Antarctica thaw.
In moving the issue forward, the IPCC and the Pacific Islands Countries (PIC) have had a great, mutually rewarding relationship with support. PIC’s interests have often been complimented by the IPCC’s findings and their voices have made a significant impact globally by forming the Alliance of Small Islands States (AOSIS). The alliance began negotiating as a group at the first meeting of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for a Framework Convention on Climate Change held in Geneva in February 1991 and it has sought every opportunity to play an active role in the global regime. As a result, its positions were reflected in the final text of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change. AOSIS, boosted by IPCC’s findings, was guided by the following principles: the principle of preventive action; the precautionary principle; the polluter pays principle and state responsibility; duty to cooperate; equity; the principle of common but differentiated responsibility; and commitment to binding energy conservation and the development of renewal energy sources.
AOSIS had developed a number of core objectives that have guided its work on the implementation of the convention and the Kyoto Protocol, namely: review of the adequacy and strengthening of industrialised-country emissions reduction commitments; reducing scientific and methodological uncertainties associated with the Kyoto Protocol’s commitments and the Kyoto mechanisms; development of strong monitoring, verification and compliance regimes; and development of mechanisms for meeting the costs of adaptation to the adverse effects of climate change.

Propelling debate to the frontline
For AOSIS, environmentalists, including the pro-Kyoto caucus, the IPCC’s latest blurb has done wonders to propel the debate to the political frontline, never mind, that the process of getting 6000 peers to review a mountain of publications is one of the most ugliest processes to be desired, where lobbyists are frantically protecting their interests.
It’s only a few weeks away before the G8 meet in Washington, USA, and it should be a sweat fest. The growing polluters; India, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa and China will be there with their armour. They will want developed countries to show leadership. It won’t be much fun for the two leaders that ignore International Law that Japan is proud of.
China will be adamant that the ‘luxury emissions’ from the developed world are to blame and must lead in reducing GHG emissions. Amidst this ‘leadership’ debate, the Kyoto Protocol’s relevance is thinning. Its lifeline for the binding reduction targets in GHG emissions to be reached is just three years away and trends don’t look too good for the report cards to be presented by the industrialised and developed State Parties to the Protocol.
Three years is a yawn away, and businesses are chilling; talking emissions trade and waking up! It’s an issue that is not going away from politics and they can no longer ignore it like before. The big problem is that businesses want a consistent and predictable national framework, so that they don’t feel like they are the lonely ones laying a Burk and Wills track in Australia.
The new Australian Environment Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has had his work cut out. Reported in the Weekend Australian (3-4 February 2007), he remarked that “climate change is a fact, not a theory, we understand that”.
The Liberal Government has been firm in stressing technology and science will drive climate policy. It was maintaining a legs-up on the debate. But that was then, this is now. Not wishing to let go of a good thing, Kevin Rudd, Leader of the Opposition, is surfing his good fortune that has been delivered by the IPCC and has called for urgent action ‘after 10 years of inaction’ domestically.
The IPCC’s ‘assessment’ has stirred the pot, and whilst temperatures are expected to rise by 4 degrees by the end of the century, there’s no room for electorate complacency. The heat is already up in parliaments around the world. Just look at Canada’s changing political environment. Australia’s landscape is sure to follow and it’s because the polls are dancing state-wide while the Greens flog away.
The Pacific Islands Countries which are keen to see the Kyoto Protocol given a chance must be pleased that the tide has turned and that an issue of importance to them is getting attention and media coverage.
Peter Garrett in his contribution to the debate on climate policy in Australia told Weekend Australian (3-4 February 2007) that the Australian Prime Minister ‘after doing nothing for 10 years on climate change, can’t change himself into Al Gore.’ The IPCC has done what no marketing guru could have achieved for climate politics. It was perfectly staged in Paris to foreshadow an agenda for the upcoming meeting of Leaders of the world’s eight elite, industrialised, ‘rich’ nations. It was brilliant showbiz.
But writing the script was a painful process as the IPCC slogged away to reach its latest ‘consensus’ through its usual circus where politics and science are married. Frankly, in the United Nation’s parlance, ‘consensus’ means: ‘not everyone agrees.’ The debate on ‘scientific proof’, natural variability and climate science is far from over. The IPCC, like the weather, has for now changed its forecast and who knows, perhaps the next time 6 years from now, if we can wait that long, we may be given ‘very great certainty.’ I’m not kidding myself. It’s very likely that it will take much more than a confidence-building statement by the world’s scientific voice on climate to warm the hearts of its critics. What a wonderful world.
Let’s see if this latest IPCC order will have any ‘radiative forcing’, to use an IPCC jargon at the next Pacific Islands Forum when Pacific Leaders meet. That being said, it’s now up to policy-makers and political masters to decide whether the panel has overstated or understated the picture. In any event, the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (FAR) will now dominate the global climate debate. Someone out there must be asking: Did the IPCC go FAR enough to ensure that the Kyoto Protocol is a safe baby in the bath water?
A great Mathematician once said: “It is better to be approximately right than to be absolutely wrong.” The frightening reality is that seal levels do rise, it is not just the Polar Bear that needs to survive. The small islands states in the Pacific are well aware that the potential impact of a 4-degree temperature rise in the Earth’s climate will be far more dramatic, regular and drastic. Don’t believe them? Well, it’s very likely that someone in those islands may be not so anthropogenic and don’t be so concentrated when he calls you a fossil sleeping in an ice-core. Remember, be careful what you wish for. The ball is now in the court of the climate sceptics to bury the current debate like nuclear waste, somewhere deep underground.

• Adam Vai Delaney served at the UN as a PNG Diplomat and as an Adviser to the Pacific Islands Forum and participated at eight Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC and numerous international meetings related to climate change and environment. He is a Director of Melanesian Links International Consultants - Promoting the Arc of Opportunity.