COP21 Terrorism Update #8

I am aware that the COP21 climate change summit ended on Saturday (12/12/15). In an age where we have things like the 9/11 terror attacks and the 7/7 terror attacks that date - 12/12 - seems highly appropriate.

As I mentioned at the time negotiators at these summits tend to operate in a state of adrenaline fuelled, sleep deprived almost delirium. It is only when they've returned home and slept off the adrenaline crash that they start to reflect on what has happened and a sort of buyers regret sets in.

Due to what can only be described as "rage incidents" in recent years there has even been something of an unspoken rule that after returning from a COP summit delegates - particularly ministers - would be given the rest of the week off work to decompress. During that time they're supposed to self-monitor for symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress rather like a soldier returning from a warzone.

Therefore I wasn't really expecting much by way of genuine reaction to start emerging until around Thursday (17/12/15) at the earliest.

However it seems to have been so obvious to all just how terrible the agreement reached at COP21 is the criticism became almost immediately.

While the COP21 closing plenary was taking place a fire which went on to kill 23 people was breaking out at a medical facility in Voronezh, South-West Russia. In some parts of the western media the facility has been described as a "Psychiatric Hospital."

However getting my news from people who actually speak Russian I can assure that it was in fact a residential care home for people with neurological impairments.

For some this might have been the result of traumatic brain injury while for others it might have been a developmental defect. However even in the post-2014 Winter Para-Olympics in Sochi world we might still get away with referring to them as "Retards."

In response to the fire a criminal negligence investigation was immediately opened and the general tone of the story has been; "Why wasn't more done to protect these extremely vulnerable people?!"

Therefore it is clearly intended as a reference to the way that the genuinely developing nations - those with severely retarded development if you like -  have lost out in the COP21 agreement. To fully describe the extent to which they've lost out I'm forced to resort to slang terms which might not translate universally such as; "Robbed," "Mugged," "Stiffed" and even "Ass-raped."

The first big loss to these nations comes in the form of the agreements 5-year commitment cycles.

Amongst the 195 nations covered by the agreement you have small island states such as Vanuatu which has a population of just 260,000. You also have extremely poor nations like the Central African Republic (CAR) where the average yearly salary is just USD330. In fact the recent unrest in the CAR began when the - literally - "Rebel Alliance" overthrew the government to discover that the government had absolutely no money.

Obviously nations like this don't have the resources to operate a full-time Environment Ministry let alone a full-time Climate Change Ministry. Therefore asking them to submit an INDC covering all aspects of their national mitigation and adaptation actions every five years places a huge burden upon them.

The second big loss for the developing nations is the transparency requirement that requires them to keep national inventories covering all emitters and sinks of all greenhouse gases (ghgs) in line with the latest IPCC standard methods and metrics. Obviously from a purely scientific perspective it is best for all nations to use the latest IPCC standard. However it has also been long understood that this places a massive burden on nations.

For example along with its neighbour the CAR the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is home to the Congo Rainforest which is the second largest in the World and covers an area roughly the size of Spain. Calculating the exact size of this roughly 50,000,000 hectare forest along with exact estimate of the number and type of plants is almost overwhelming task for any country.

It's made almost impossible for the DRC because at any given point there are roughly 5 armed conflicts going on the Congo Rainforest so the DRC government isn't even able to operate in much of it let alone carry out environmental impact assessments.

Throughout the long discussions on the issue of capacity building there has been lots of recognition of the need not to place undue burdens on vulnerable nations. Placing undue burdens is exactly what the 5-year commitment cycles and the transparency requirements does.

In terms of helping those nations shoulder the new burdens placed upon them there is certainly none coming from the financial elements of the agreement.

The vulnerable nations did manage to have the 5 year old pledge of USD100bn per year funding to the Green Climate Fund (GCF) included in the text of the agreement. However this is not legally binding and even if it was international law doesn't work like.

For example in the form of the United Nations Charter those 195 nations are bound by an international treaty that legally forbids them from invading other nations to steal their treasures or simply overthrow governments they don't like.

Yet on Sunday (13/12/15) - the day after COP21 ended - US Secretary of State John Kerry travelled to Rome, Italy for a meeting to discuss the best way to overthrow the Libyan government for the second time in 4 years. The following day - Monday (14/12/15) - Kerry returned to Paris, France for a meeting to discuss the best way to overthrow the Syrian government.

Despite the text of the agreement the best the GCF can hope for in funding is for that funding to continue at its current level of around USD10bn per year. This is enough to provide just 14 nations with minimal flood defences.

By scrapping the requirement for nations to submit viable adaptation plans to access GCF funding the agreement actually provides a massive incentive for GCF funding to be reduced.

Away from the agreement itself the big, white hope is that the private sector will step in to fill the funding gap with what are known as "Private Finance Initiatives (PFI's)."

Already well established in the developed world these see private companies pay to build things like hospitals and prisons. The taxpayer/state then pays these private companies a premium to use these new facilities.

PFI is an acronym that will strike terror into the hearts of anyone familiar with recent British politics.

Although first introduced by the Conservative government of John Mayor in 1992 they were really embraced by the Labour government of Tony Blair in 1997. They were used to build all these wonderful new hospital, schools and transport links to show that the government cared about the needs of the electorate without having to ask them for more money in taxes.

Then after about 10 years these PFI schemes started to explode one-by-one.

Amongst the biggest of these was the 2009 collapse of Metronet a PFI intended to provide infrastructure services to the London Underground rail network. This cost the taxpayer around USD0.75bn.

Then in 2012 seven NHS hospital trusts were unable to meet their PFI re-payments triggering a further USD2.2bn taxpayer bailout and one of the trusts - the South London Healthcare NHS Trust - being declared bankrupt and shut down.

Other developed world countries have had similar horror stories with PFI schemes but lesson has always been the same; Taxpayers will have to pay once to provide massive profits for the investors and then pay again to actually provide the service.

While I have always accepted that the private sector has a vital role to play in climate finance the desperate rush towards PFI that this new agreement creates strikes me as just another example of products that have proved unsuccessful in developed world markets simply being dumped on the developing world.

In the field of climate change we recently had a similar problem with genetically modified crops. After spending trillions of dollars developing this new technology companies like Monsanto suddenly discovered there was no market for them in the developed world.

It was a this point Monsanto decided that it actually had a very expensive miracle product that would solve the developing world's food security concerns by offering drought and flood resistant crops. The fact that it helped Monsanto unload its unwanted inventory was just a complete coincidence.

Helping the - dare I say "naive" - governments of developing nations identify which private sector initiatives can genuinely help them and which are just a scam intended to rip them off would be one of the key functions of the peer review process. However by agreeing to the Paris draft the developing nations themselves have rejected that avenue of assistance.

So as with the tragedy in Voronezh at COP21 the more capable really should have done more to protect the most vulnerable to stop them being engulfed in the fires of hell.

I must say though that despite their criticism after the event I didn't see Russia stepping up to veto the agreement. However with Russia leading the line against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and being severely punished for it by the rest of the developed world over the past five years I can see why Russia would be hesitant to step up and take yet more blows on other peoples behalf.

Much more of the blame has to lie with China. Over the past five years of these negotiations China has been using the most vulnerable nations effectively as cannon-fodder to be thrown in the way of demands for an end to Kyoto Protocol style binary differentiation.

Although that sounds extremely harsh it's actually a pretty standard pratice in this type of negotiations. Nations led by the US loudly demand that all nations must take action on climate change while China leads a group of developing nations demanding that only developed nations take action.

Eventually though we reach a compromise where all nations must take action but the poorest and the most vulnerable are able to count the resources they expend submitting their INDC's and maintaining their ghg inventories as their action.

The problem arose though in the US' desperate, last minute attempts to re-write Paragraph 4, Article 4 of the agreement which deals with the differentiation issue. The US' primary objective here seems to have been a futile effort to simply deprive me of ammunition with which to criticise the agreement. As a result they screwed it up.

In that American failure China suddenly got greedy.

Not only did they get to keep the principle of binary differentiation which means they never have to reduce their emissions the Chinese also decided that they could exploit the massive funding gap to increase their geo-political influence through bilateral funding to the most vulnerable nations. While the Chinese terms are likely to be highly aggressive and tilted in its favour they're still like to be a safer bet then the PFI schemes.

So I'm inclined to think that any nation that isn't China or India probably wants a do-over.



Anyway this rather long post actually only covers one of the roughly five topics I wanted to deal with. However having put my entire life on hold for the best part of a month for COP21 I now have to go out and do things in the real world.

12:20 on 15/12/15 (UK date).