The Guardian environment editor John Vidal reports from the UN climate change conference in Paris, on what the deal might mean for developing countries
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Reports and presenters:
JV: John Vidal
Interviewees:
EA: Eunice Andrada
HEH: Hakima El Haite
MR: Mukund Rajan
DW: Dessima Williams
CW: Changhua Wu
JC: Jeremy Corbyn
ST: Shiferaw Teklemariam
EM: Ed Miliband
MR2: Mary Robinson
MR3: Meena Raman
AS: Alberto Saldamando
EA There was a time that could preserve us. Two years ago the number of people displaced by natural disasters tripled the number of war refugees. How can you see sky and not admit decay? This world isn’t a race to turn away from the ruins, whether family history or a whole country shatters against the tide, whether we keep our lives but lose our homes, we lose.
HEH The problem of the climate change is not a country-specific problem, this is a worldwide problem.
MR We had the Uttarakhand floods two-and-a-half years back where over 5,000 people lost their lives; we had unprecedented floods in Jammu in Kashmir, which hit the capital city of Srinagar. We had the earthquake in Nepal where over 10,000 people lost their lives.
DW When I was growing up, we had a beach that is no longer swimmable because all the trees have fallen into the ocean, have been eaten up by the ocean.
CW I live in Beijing so I literally experience smogs on a regular basis. It’s really bad, horrible, you get really worried about your own health, about your children’s health, everything like that, so there’s a sense of urgency overall in the society.
JC The west actually has the bigger responsibility because the west is the larger polluter, is the larger emitter and is the most economically powerful bloc in the world.
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ST I think our hope is the globe shall be united and act together.
JV My name is John Vidal, and I’m the environment editor for the Guardian. I’m here at COP 21 in Paris, and in this edition of the Global development podcast we’ll outline how the agreement could affect developing countries. Let’s put into context how far things have come since the last major COP, which was in 2009 in Copenhagen. Ed Miliband, you were the British environment secretary of state in Copenhagen. what are your experiences of climate change, your personal experiences?
EM Well, I think we know so much more now than we did then about the fact that climate change is already here and happening, one degree of warming, clear linkages to extreme weather events that have happened, so I think compared to six years ago, when I was doing this as the climate change secretary, I think the imperative is even stronger than it was then.
JV And now we’re in Paris for COP 21. So what has changed?
EM The political will seems to be stronger, I think in particular China and America. I would say that what President Obama’s done in his second term and the focus of the Chinese has turned things quite significantly.
AS I think the questions are not being tackled directly, so I think it’s cloudy like the weather.
EA There’s just a lot going on, there’s a lot at stake, things are moving but not at the level that they should be moving at.
MR2 Mary Robinson, I’m the special envoy to the secretary general on climate change and I also have my foundation on climate justice. The mood has changed a little bit and there’s a bit more of a sense that, yes, we can get an agreement and that it will be as ambitious as possible. And that’s a little bit different from the middle of last week, so I’m more hopeful but there’s still a lot of work to do.
JV There is a sense that any agreement will always contain an inherent inequity between developed and developing countries. Meena Raman is from the Third World Network, an international NGO HQ’d in Malaysia. Now she’s been to many of these COPs, so I spoke to her in Paris.
MR3 We know that the contributions that parties have put on the table at the moment don’t do that job fast enough. However, developing countries are making their effort and I think unlike Kyoto everybody is on board towards that process. But I think in order for it to be fair and just to the developing world, one of the most important concerns that they have raised is that it must recognise the principle of common but differentiated responsibility.
JV Meena, that means that richer countries should really act further and faster than developing countries. Are we seeing this principle being dismantled here in Paris?
MR3 Exactly. Now that seems to be the agenda of the rich, developed world.
JV Small island states like Grenada in the Caribbean can not only get dwarfed in the negotiations but are also some of the nations right on the front line, suffering the most.
DW My name is Dessima Williams and I come from Grenada, I’m an avid advocate for justice.
JV And here in Paris you’re a delegate on your country’s delegation.
DW That’s correct, and I’m also here in support of the work of Oxfam International. The way of life as we knew it, which was relatively stable and known, is no longer the case. Our agriculture, our tourism is at risk because 65% – 63%-65% – of all our physical infrastructure and, most of all, commercial activities are on the coast and that’s getting inundated with the sea. Our airport is at risk, it will go underwater if we have a metre rise.
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JV Do you think people here in Paris, especially from the rich countries, do you think they actually understand what is at stake?
DW Over a hundred countries do, and that’s why we’ve asked for a maximum of 1.5C as a tolerable global average temperature so that we do not put ourselves at further risk. I think the more powerful countries, that larger physical mass, may not quite understand the immediacy of the threat and the impact of climate change to small islands, to coastal countries. And we have been fighting to get that message across for many years. I think it’s beginning to sink in a bit but the policymakers, some of them, still feel that there is time and space to manoeuvre because they have big economies, big land mass. Many countries in Africa, across Africa, the Pacific, the Caribbean, we have small economies that cannot continuously finance the destruction caused by climate change, neither do we have large land mass where people can in fact escape the ravages of the sea and the rains and so on. So I think we have an uphill battle to meet in the commons of justice.
JV In Ethiopia they are also experiencing the effects of climate change.
ST I’m Shiferaw Teklemariam, a minister in the Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Climate Change in Ethiopia. In some parts of the nation we are already experiencing flooding, drought, the El Niño is causing a number of challenges, so the united globe has to act commonly on the problem, of course differentiated in the way we respond. So here justice, equity and also addressing your own genuine share towards climate change is what we are requiring.
JV The Leader of the Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, was in Paris to attend COP, and also lead a meeting with activist Naomi Klein. So we asked him how he saw this inequity manifested.
JC In the ability to represent, the ability to prepare, the ability to put forward technical arguments, because the west clearly has far greater resources than poorer countries in the world.
JV The question is, should developing countries like Britain be setting stronger targets? Jeremy Corbyn.
JC Much stronger targets, and we should abide by those targets and we should use all our influence here to get the strongest possible legally binding target and ensure that it is adhered to and carried out, and that the US in particular ratifies that target back in the Senate. So there has to be a proper climate change fund and $100bn being suggested is a good start, but I think we’re going to have to go further than that in order to deal with the levels of inequality.
JV So what kind of agreement do most developing countries really need?
HEH I am the minister of environment in Morocco and my name is Hakima El Haite. We are a developing country and we need help, we need transfer of technology, we need enhancement of capacity in some issues and some technologies. We need funds.
JV What happens if the agreement is a weak agreement and not much gets sorted out? Is this very serious for Africa and for Morocco?
HEH No, it’s serious for the world, sir, this is what all the industrial countries should understand, because if they want, and if we want around the world, to establish the balance of CO2 in the globe, the only chance is to let Africa and the G77 to develop in a different way. We are already suffering, you know, and we are already trying to adapt with our knowhow, limited knowhow.
JV So how could developing countries address this gap?
HEH I think that as Morocco we are a very nice model to the other countries, we have learned from our own experience that money is bringing in money, so if we have small public money we can attract investment and we can attract private sector partners, and this is very important to develop all the projects around the world, in Africa and elsewhere.
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EA Now, my hometown is still drying its feet as more poison bleeds overhead. They say it is sacrifice so we can live in comfort but what shelter can we find in disease? I’m Eunice Andrada, I’m a poet from the Philippines. I’m from a team of poets for the Global Call for Climate Action as part of their project called Spoken Word for the World.
JV Most COPs feel pretty democratic and there are civil society groups from all over the world, and they make a lot of noise and they are lobbying their delegates at every point, this one feels slightly different, partly because of the atrocity in Paris and the security here is very, very high. Indigenous people have come from all over the globe – Africa, Latin America, even Europe. They came hoping for just one line to be in the final agreement; it has, however, been taken out.
AS Alberto Saldamando, I’m with the Indigenous Environmental Network, who are devoting all of their energies to the creation of carbon markets and carbon offsets. And the object of the offsets are indigenous lands and territories – the forests, the lands – and we’re trying to protect them, or at least get something into the operative language that talks about respecting the observance of the rights of indigenous peoples.
The Green Climate Fund, they funded a so-called risk programme in Peru which raises reduction of emissions from deforestation and degradation of forests, and the idea is to increase the capacity of the forest to absorb carbon. Where they expect it to be absorbed are indigenous lands and indigenous forests, and there the market is going to say, “We own the trees, we own the carbon in the trees so you can’t touch them.” So, eventually, it’s going to affect their food security, we won’t be able to fell trees or clear fields. In fact, I talked to one guy who said that in his country, where he lives, they can’t even fish, they’re prohibited from fishing. So what are people supposed to do?
JV We know now that indigenous rights will not be in this agreement; nevertheless, the Green Climate Fund was one of the great hopes for these talks. That will be the repository that will be a UN, effectively a bank, where all the money which is raised by the rich countries, the $100bn, will be put for different projects and then developing countries will apply to do projects for them. Now, it’s a battleground in itself because the rich countries want control of the money, they say it’s their money, they should control how it’s spent – and the developing countries say no, this is ours by right and we should decide how the money is spent. So it’s a huge battleground and it’s yet to be worked out. Issues like indigenous rights really just get relegated or dismissed completely but the one thing which is very much alive is renewable energy.
CW My name is Changhua Wu, I’m the Greater China director of the Climate Group. The Climate Group has the international NGO headquarters in London, so I run the Greater China operations working in China. China, like many other parts of the world, has actually started to experience more and more extreme weathers and on a personal basis, of course, I live in Beijing and 2007 when there was huge flooding there were lives actually sacrificed in that process.
I think China definitely has been advocating the energy efficiency, alternative energy development, and if you follow the Chinese president, Xi Jinping’s travel schedule this year you will find that he himself has already become the champion, the voice, the messenger of global sustainable development. Of course, there is China’s sustainable development there as well, and of course in November in Beijing at the Apec summit, you started to see President Xi Jinping and President Obama coming together, making joint announcements demonstrating the leadership and calling everyone to come on board and towards a low carbon future, that part has been unfolding in China, which is very exciting.
JV Tata is one of the world’s biggest companies and in India; it’s gone very heavily into wind and to solar power.
MR I’m Mukund Rajan, I work with the Tata Group. I’m a member of the group executive council with responsibility for our sustainability activities. We’re seeing the speed of natural calamities coming thick and fast, at a pace we’ve never seen before, and in each of these occasions we’ve tried to mount our rescue efforts, but we are now getting stretched ourselves.
JV And meanwhile, there’s enormous air pollution in Indian cities, growth spurting ahead, desperate for more energy.
MR Absolutely. I think a lot of people don’t realise that in India, given the size of our population, actually a very large number of people even today don’t have access to the electricity grid, over 300 million people by some estimates. And their energy needs, just to get to basic sustenance, is going to itself require a significant amount of investment, which is why we need to talk about what will be the path through which they access that electricity without making the same mistakes we’ve had to make in the past.
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JV But Tata, as I understand it, has got large interests in solar energy and also in wind energy. How will these be affected by this agreement, hopefully, which is made?
MR The Indian prime minister’s actually recently announced a very major ambition, we are trying to navigate the international solar alliance of countries between the tropic of cancer, the tropic of capricorn, and his announcement suggests that India will now have an ambition to create at least a hundred gigawatts of solar power.
JV That’s compared to what now?
MR Minimal; it’s less than 10,000 megawatts in India at the moment.
JV So this would be an immense achievement?
MR This will be a gigantic leap forward, it’ll probably make India the world’s largest solar market.
JV As far as solar goes, one of the most ambitious African countries is Morocco. It’s just launched the world’s largest concentrated solar power plant. Hakima El Haite again.
HEH Morocco used to import and to be dependent on 97% of its energy from abroad, and it was very heavy on the budget of the state – and Morocco used to subsidise and to fund fossil fuels. Today, we have decided many years ago, ten years ago, to have this energy policy to produce clean energy with ambitions even to export this clean energy and, I’m really, as a Moroccan, very proud.
DW So the work really escalates after we finish Paris, and that’s why Paris is so important because it gives us very strong and high ambitious parameters to go home and implement.
JV Of the 196 countries who are here, 189 have already put in what they call intended nationally determined contributions, or INDCs. Now they’ve lodged these with the UN and each one is their country’s ambition, if the money’s available, what they will do. And, if you total them all up, what you see is there’s not enough to keep us under a two degree limit, which is what everybody wants, it’ll be something like 2.7 so there’s a long, long way to go, but it’s a very, very good start.
DW The review of the global temperature goal has not been concluded, and I know a lot of developing countries will keep it on the table to show that the science is directing us to 1.5C. So the review is ongoing, the INDCs have to be acted upon, they have to be realised, we will agree here on a common metric and a common measure but in the case of the developing countries they have to have the technology and the capacity building to actually turn them into reality.
JV This will be seen as a historic COP, one way or the other. It’s the result of 20 years of debate, it’s the culmination of a huge effort by the international community. But people say it’s really just the beginning and it’s what happens next that is key to the whole thing, whether it was worth it or not. Now we won’t know for many years because a lot of this stuff won’t kick in for five years at the very, very least but it will absolutely define our development paths, everybody’s, over the next 20, 30 years.
EM The COP is not, in the end, the be all and end all, it’s what happens afterwards, because Copenhagen was very, very problematic in many respects, but it’s actually the work that’s gone on since that has if you like, turned things round and Paris is going to be more successful, I hope, but we’re going to need a lot more work in the days and weeks and months and years ahead.
JV What is really noticeable is that everybody wants change, everybody can see here that we can’t go on in the same way.
HEH I’m an optimist. Why? Because people are moving. Cities around the world are moving, the private sector is moving, NGOs are moving, territories are moving.
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JV This conference gives a little bit of a chance for that change to happen and that’s why people are optimistic, because they feel that it has been well overdue and countries have really got to start thinking in a very different way about how they all develop.
JC We’ve then got to hold the governments that have agreed to it to those agreements, but above all to build for the next one and I think that the climate change march is a good sign that people are waking up to it. We don’t have to be afraid of the future, we have to be optimistic about it and be involved in it.
All of our programmes are available on the Guardian’s website. That’s theguardian.com/global-development and on SoundCloud, iTunes and all podcasting apps. This programme was presented by John Vidal and the producer was Kary Stewart. Until next month, goodbye.
