Formulating five ways just to thank Ban Ki-moon: Behind the scenes at the Lima climate conference
Reporter Ben Garside gives an insider’s view of the international climate talks underway in Lima: from covering six miles in an hour, to watching the negotiating text swell.
With parties still deeply divided heading into the final scheduled day of the two-week U.N. climate change conference in Lima, ‘gridlock’ is a fitting way to describe both the talks and host venue.
Peru’s sprawling capital is home to around 10 million people and, for the 12,531 delegates attending the conference, the first battle has just been navigating to the venue.
It has taken me and most of the rest of us about an hour each day in shuttle buses and taxis to travel six miles from Lima’s swish hotel district to the “Pentagonito” army headquarters towards the outskirts of town, often at no more than walking pace along the city’s traffic-clogged streets. And it’s more than a minor irritation. According to the World Resources Institute, Lima’s traffic is costing the city around eight percent of its GDP as its citizens sit in jams when they could be working.
Few at the conference would question those numbers or disagree with former Mexican President’s Felipe Calderon’s speech on why building more compact cities, with good public transport links, are essential in tackling climate change, as more and more of us are set to live in cities over the coming decades.
“We cannot live anymore in this very old and inefficient model of cities geared toward the individual use of cars and the hours wasted for people,” he told a high-level panel, on behalf of the New Climate Economy initiative.
Fringe progress
After finally arriving at the venue, a purpose-built tented village the size of eleven football fields, delegates from former vice-presidents (Al Gore) down to city leaders have set themselves apart from the negotiations and brim with positive examples of taking action to cut emissions.
These include a group of Chinese cities that expect to peak their rising emissions output as early as next year, well ahead of the 2030 date the national government is considering.
Or the eight Latin American countries that unveiled new plans this week to restore huge swathes of forest.
But the talks themselves have struggled to find a way of capturing positive action from non-government actors including businesses, associations, provinces and local governments.
“It’s bizarre, because there’s been amazing progress on renewable energy and energy efficiency in cities all around the world … countries here seem at a loss on how to integrate these positive developments,” said Celia Gautier of green group Climate Action Network France.
In the years since the failed Copenhagen summit of 2009, the official negotiations have grown increasingly detached from the dizzying wave of side-events, conferences, cocktail parties and protest marches and that go on in and around the venue itself.
That’s because when Copenhagen summit failed to deliver a globally, legally-binding agreement to curb rising greenhouse gas emissions, the process has gradually shifted away from being the only focal point of action to tackle climate change.
Beyond business-as-usual
Having only one paragraph of text agreed heading into the final scheduled day of negotiations might be cause for concern to those less familiar with the process.
But veterans of these 20-year-old talks say everything can fall into place very quickly once environment ministers start working behind the scenes to unblock key areas.
“We had some difficulties, this is natural, it’s like a business-as-usual for this process,” said Brazil’s environment minister Isabella Teixeira.
This nothing-is-agreed-until-everything-is-agreed approach doesn’t tie in well with journalists’ daily deadlines, and it’s not just the media that feels frustrated.
“It can be a painful process,” admits Dirk Forrister, who heads business group International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) and attended the very first so-called Conference of the Parties meeting in 1994 as part of U.S. President Bill Clinton’s staff.
He said the most striking example of this in Lima was when negotiators allowed the text to swell from six to 50 pages and drafted five different ways to thank U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon for his September climate summit in New York.
Ban couldn’t have been impressed. His New York summit gathered more than 100 heads of state to ensure the path to a deal in Paris goes smoothly and he spoke on several high-level panels in Lima urging negotiators to pick up the pace.
He had some powerful assistance on Thursday when a flying visit from U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry almost brought the conference to a standstill and packed out a normally well-under populated press conference room. I and dozens of other journalists were forced to watch on monitors outside while crowded out by government officials armed with camera phones.
To some, it’s going to take that sort of high-level leadership to break the deadlock and secure an agreement here that can pave the way for global deal in Paris next year.
As Salemul Huq, a Bangladeshi climate expert who advises a group of the world’s poorest countries, puts it:
“Negotiators will get nowhere here unless leaders get together to show that the world has moved on from the rich-poor divide that has blocked progress for so long but that no longer exists except in the negotiating rooms here”.