Tale Hammerø Ellingvåg from Young Friends of the Earth Norway gives us a final reflection on the UN climate talks in Lima.
“The last stop before Paris” is history. Many governments are happy with the outcome, but impacted people all over the world did not wake up safer or more assured that the world took responsibility to clean up the climate mess.
The climate talks of 2014 took place in Lima, Peru, in a building called El Pentagonito or the Little Pentagon. El Pentagonito is Peru’s military headquarters and was built in 1975 by the dictator Juan Velasco Alvarado and has a dark past which includes being a torture chamber. It goes without saying that the location meant that there was pretty heavy security, so the possibilities of doing the classic actions outside the climate negotiations was limited, to say the least.
Lima is also known for its outrageous traffic. The city is so big and the traffic is so dense that one must calculate an hour of travel almost wherever one wants to go. This meant that there was an hour of travel from the hotel districts to the climate talks’ venue, and an hour from the venue to the activist hub CasActiva and the “People’s Climate Summit” nearby. The distance and inaccessibility of the negotiations limited the impact opportunities to both Peruvians activists and activists from around the world, who remained outside the negotiations.
Inside the negotiations, I sometimes felt I was at a festival. Large tents, super expensive food, a burning sun, corporations with booths pushing their crap (fossil fuels and false solutions in this case) and people from around the world who meet each other at this regular event once a year. But, the most obvious similarity between negotiations and a festival was perhaps that content could be exciting when you sat in the midst of it, but the result (a text called “Lima Call for Climate Action”) was not very useful for the rest of the world.
These negotiations had a few major conflicts. The most significant was the conflict about what the INDCs should be and contain. I am sorry I do not have a less geeky term than “INDCs”, but it is an acronym for Intended Nationally Determined Contributions. In other words – the climate contributions (OBS: not commitments) each party intend (OBS: not commit) to deliver to the Paris agreement, that is determined nationally (OBS: in other words – global south cannot tell global north if they are too lousy or leave out their fair share according to historic responsibilities).
The biggest conflicts under this was 1) whether Common But Differenced Responsibilities (CBDR) between developed and developing countries should stay strong or not. And, 2) whether the climate agreement of Paris next year should bind developed nations to contribute on finance for mitigation and adaptation, technology transfer, capacity building and the crucial, but ignored, point of help for loss and damage caused by already occurring climate change events.
Another conflict point was revising and pushing for more ambitious pre-2020 targets and commitments on climate action before the Paris agreement comes into effect in 2020.
The huge rift between global North and global South on a general international basis pervades these negotiations. A lot of people make the mistake of assuming the global North and global South meet in this space on equal terms. The major, underlying issue is tha thet power structure, historic bonds and outcome of other negotiations and events are not left at the doorstep of the climate talks. We say the climate fight is global. Still, we tend to leave out that the fight is not the same for everyone. The global North fights to keep status quo as much as they can, often on behalf of big corporations. The global South fights to change structures in the world.
This is reflected in the question of process in the climate talks as well. One example is the conflict of the negotiating procedure. Normal UN procedure is to project text-on-screen and negotiate the text while all parties are able to follow on screen. Developing countries and the Co-Chairs pushed through to negotiate based on text printed and presented by the Co-Chairs themselves, making the process a lot less transparent and democratic, while framing the case as the developing countries wanting to slow down the process.
Lima did not bring us any closer to getting a fair, just and ambitious agreement for the climate and people in December 2015. El Pentagonito continues to remain an area limiting people more than helping them. Or, as many of the world’s climate justice movement state:
“The Lima Conference should have been a milestone that marked out how governments will take urgent action to tackle climate change and to support vulnerable people across the world to adapt to its locked in impacts. (…) Lima prepares us for an agreement in Paris that ignores the needs and rights of impacted people across the world by precluding binding commitments on finance, adaption, loss and damage and technology transfer.”
I will go as far as to say that these talks halted the process and the needed progress, as many of the most important, political decisions and clarifications was postponed to talks in 2015. Starting with Geneva in February, a space even less transparent for the world’s civil society.
A tiny speck of light in the negotiations was that energy and climate finally were discussed in context to each other. A carbon world has gone from being viewed as a green utopia to be a real discussion point on negotiations. Inside the negotiation bubble, the African Group for example came up with a proposal that would build large amounts of renewable energy on the continent, paid by polluters and on the citizens own terms. Over 50 countries already supports a total phase-out of fossil energy by 2050.
Outside the negotiation bubble, incredibly many things happen. The Reclaim Power movement is growing, more and more universities divest from fossil fuels and 20 000 people marched for climate justice in the Lima Climate March during the climate talks.
People all over the world are now fighting for a just energy transition, for preparing for disasters through climate adaption and for rebuilding communities after disasters have occurred. People are fighting for their rights as indigenous people, as fishers and farmers, and as citizens on the same planet, but with different starting points and privileges.
We will all continue to push for a just and ambitious outcome in the coming year and also at the final lap in Paris in December, and resist a “climate agreement” who does little or nothing for earth and people. However, it is clearer now than ever that we need to have two thoughts in our heads at the same time.
The Global Climate Justice Movement for and by the world’s people is growing, and we need to fight for it to grow even bigger, stronger, more visible and louder – fast. In Paris, we should be the majority of the people attending that chaotic festival. However, we need to fight governments and corporations in our local space as well as the international, and hold our politicians accountable of fighting for us, not for big money, inside as well as outside of the UNFCCC space.
Finally, I will end with these climate talks’ unofficial mantra: They tried to bury us, but they forgot we were seeds, and we will grow to a forest of resistance.