New Zealand Youth Delegation

Young people have a very special place amongst the people of the world when it comes to climate change. Clearly, the bulk of historical carbon emissions have been caused by generations past, and in particular our parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

In addition, people who are not yet born can have no say in decisions that affect them. Where are the voices of those born in 2040 in today’s negotiations? Intergenerational equity is the idea that there should be equity between generations, so that past generations can be equal to present and future generations. Present generations should leave a world comparable to the one we grew up in, to afford future generations the same rights and privileges their parents had.

But our parents’ generation has failed us when it comes to acting on climate change. We have been aware of the situation since at least the 70′s, and the UNFCCC has been working now for 20 years. They have been negotiating for, literally, our whole lives. But we have consistently failed to see adequate climate action.

So the youth of today are affected in a unique way by climate change. A quote from American activist Tim DeChristopher sums this up nicely:

“It means that we’re never going to have the opportunities that our parents’ and our grandparents’ generations had, and that we’ve got this massive burden weighing on our future. We constantly hear baby boomers saying to young people: “Stopping climate change is going to be the challenge of your generation.” Well, that’s not really true. We’ve known about climate change for 20 years, during the time when baby boomers were holding power in this country. Stopping climate change was the challenge of the baby boomer generation, and they failed because it would’ve meant making sacrifices and putting their children’s and grandchildren’s generations ahead of their own. They chose not to do that.”

As such, I think that climate change is one factor contributing to the kind of youth disengagement and disempowerment in political processes we see in the extremely low level of voter turnout amongst youth.

How should youth feel about this? Firstly, for us, climate change is deeply personal. From Tim:

“For a young person looking at climate change, it is personal. It is an older generation trading our lives for their own short-term interests, whether that’s fossil fuel executives trading our lives for profit or whether that’s baby boomer liberals trading our lives for their own comfort and convenience because they don’t want to take the risk of fighting back.”

How should we respond? There’s a quote from Tim which I find really interesting, about anger:

“I’ve never seen a place in this movement or in the discourse around climate change where it’s considered appropriate for young people to express their anger at old people. But it’s just under the surface. I don’t think we can have a healthy dialogue around climate change until young people are able to express that anger in an honest way, just like I don’t think we ever could have had really honest and productive dialogues around race without the expression of black rage. Certainly we need more than just rage, and on its own, it’s not productive. But if it’s not ever addressed, I think it’s hard to move forward in a trusting way.”

We have a right to be angry. But it’s not all about anger. Tim speaks about how once he got beyond the sheer terror he felt when he thought about the reality of climate change, he found it liberating:

“Once I realised that there was no hope in any sort of normal future, there’s no hope for me to have anything my parents or grandparents would have considered a normal future - of a career and a retirement and all that stuff - I realised that I have nothing to lose by fighting back. Because it was all going to be lost anyway.”

Further, he says, “[i]t’s somewhat comforting knowing that things are going to fall apart, because it does give us that opportunity to change things.”

I find this fascinating. This takes all that is bad about climate change and flips it on its head. It marks a paradigm shift in the way that young people think. Because we are not going to have the same kind of lives as our parents - as much as some of us may want that life. And if we choose to accept it, this can liberate us. We don’t have to follow predetermined pathways. We can live the kind of lives that we want to lead.

I’ve long known that climate change is not a single-issue issue. It interconnects with and threads between many different spheres, such as the environment, the economy, science, development, gender issues, sociology, politics, policy, engineering, human rights, indigenous rights, intellectual property, and public health. But being here in Lima has brought home to me, yet again, in a very concrete way, that climate change is about, perhaps more than anything else, class, equity and poverty.

More about class later. Right now I want to introduce right now the related concept of kyriarchy. First introduced by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, in essence this is the idea that there are separate but interlocking and interacting systems of oppression, including those based on gender, race, ableism, sexuality, class, education, and, yes, how one is affected by climate change. A person may be privileged in some systems and oppressed in others. Just as the struggles of a white upper middle class gay woman are different to those of a minority ethnicity man living in poverty, the challenges faced by a black man living in North America are not comparable with those of a black woman living in sub-Saharan Africa, the Philippines, or other areas which face severe climate impacts now and into the future. Although the concept of kyriarchy is well known, oppression based on climate change never seems to be expressly included in it, and I think it should be.

Last year I wrote about how underlying power dynamics and class issues play out in a very real and perceivable procedural way in the negotiations. That is no less true this year. This time I want to write about how those dynamics interplay with the actual issues at stake in the talks, and about how our social movements should and must react. A foundation of the UNFCCC agreement is the concept of “common but differentiated responsibility and respective capabilities”, which is the idea that countries should contribute, in terms of emissions cuts and finance, in a way that is proportionate to both their responsibility for the problem, and their capacity to help fix it. Implicit in it is the idea of historic responsibility, which is how much carbon each country has emitted throughout history. Sounds simple, right? But the debate over what, precisely, these seven words mean has spanned twenty years and counting.

At the core of the equity issue is that those countries that have contributed least to the problem are most often the ones that will be most affected by it yet have the least capacity to adapt. The way climate change will affect those living in the slums of Mumbai or on farms in Nicaragua vastly differs from how it will impact those living in suburban New Zealand or Norway, yet it is the latter countries who have contributed more to the problem and have benefited from burning fossil fuels . A key component of the Kyoto Protocol was the division of countries into Annex I and non-Annex I countries - meaning that only developed countries had to take binding emissions cuts. There will be no such stark dichotomy in the new agreement, which countries have already agreed must be “applicable to all”. But it’s not clear yet how contributions will be determined: the corporate-driven governments of the global North want to be free to contribute however much or little they want, whereas developing countries are keen for some sort of review system that links contributions to historic responsibility and capacity. It is an unfortunate fact that developed countries have become rich from their emissions, whereas developing countries cannot afford to make as great a contribution. People living in poverty cannot afford to do anything, let alone cut their meagre emissions. Similarly, you cannot fix climate change by telling already poor pensioners to turn off their heaters for an extra hour each day, or telling working-class Britons to cycle an hour or more to work. Class cannot be separated from climate.

The issues of finance, adaptation, technology transfer and loss and damage are also critical here. Developed countries want the new agreement to include only mitigation, and not these other subjects. However, developing countries argue than in order to mitigate, finance is required, and because climate change impacts are already being felt by developing countries who do not have the capacity to adapt by themselves, developed countries need to help with adaptation and loss and damage. Technology transfer, in addition, is necessary to help developing countries develop in a low carbon way without being trapped in poverty; it would be immensely unfair if ceasing emissions meant that developing countries were locked into their situations forever. As such, it’s clear that it would be a great injustice if adaptation, loss and damage, technology transfer and finance were not included in the new agreement. The intersectionality of climate issues cannot be ignored. Class cannot be separated from climate.

Some “solutions” to climate change are similarly fraught with oppression. Mega-dams in Uganda have displaced hundreds of thousands. Biofuels replace the forests of indigenous peoples. Carbon markets have been proven to immensely benefit traders while having little to no impact on climate change.(reference needed’- eu bank report) REDD+, or reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, is a controversial mechanism which is based on the premise that those in the global South should be rewarded for keeping their forests rather than cutting them down. However, REDD+ more often than not acts to displace communities and violate rights. All of these so-called “solutions” disproportionately affect those in the global South.

Now, to turn to the movement. Audre Lorde said that there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not lead single-issue lives. In a similar vein, Chimamanda Adichie reminds us of the danger of telling a single story. This is never more true than in the climate movement. Fracking debates are as much about health as they are about environment. Coal mining struggles can be about health, environment, labour, or indigenous rights. The plight of indigenous peoples living in the Amazon is complex and multifaceted. The climate movements, working alone, cannot adequately address these problems.

Our collective movements - environmental movements, food movements, labour movements, indigenous movements, class movements, gender movements - must link together if we are to have a good chance in this fight, if we are to tackle kyriarchy. Someone in a talk I attended at the Cumbre de Los Pueblos today said (and I agree) that the left is a lot more fractured than the right. The right is a lot more united, in part because they are better at compromise - they are satisfied if only half of their requirements are met in any coalition agreement, whereas left-leaning groups are often more particular about the details and find it harder to compromise. We need to negotiate our differences, now more than ever in the lead up to Paris, and respect the people who work on different levels so we don’t end up undermining each other. This is particularly so in the climate movement, because it is not a single-issue issue.

Personally, Lima has confirmed my affiliation with the ‘climate justice’ movements. I do not think that climate can be looked at in isolation from other issues and systemic problems. “Cambiemos el sistema, no el clima,” as they say here in Peru. I’m sure my thinking will continue to evolve as I attend the Cumbre for the remainder of this week. Adios for now!

I am not proud of my country.

There are many things I love about New Zealand: our mountains, our beaches, our accents, our culture, our wildlife – but our climate policy is not one of them.

It’s Day 5 here at COP and not much has happened in the negotiations. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much. But I find myself becoming, inexplicably, angry. To be precise, I’m becoming angry at New Zealand. It’s not even about anything in particular that we’ve done. Rather, it’s about what we’ve not done – and about our long-held positions here at the UNFCCC.

Three things in particular stand out to me: targets, bounded flexibility, and climate finance.

Targets

New Zealand’s first target under the Kyoto Protocol was to reduce our emissions to 1990 levels by 2012. Amazingly, we met this target – but only because we counted the carbon temporarily absorbed by a boom in commercial pine plantations, which are due for harvest from around 2020. Our total greenhouse gas emissions are now 22% higher than in 1990.

We are now aiming to reduce our net emissions in 2020 to 5% below 1990 levels. However, we will miserably fail to meet this goal. By 2020, net emissions are predicted to jump to 27-30% above the 1990 gross emissions level.

Even if this target were to be met, it would still fall far short of what is required to limit warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius.

Our current policies will reduce total emissions by just 0.4% by 2030 compared with taking no action at all – and at this rate we will blow through our per capita share of the remaining global carbon budget before 2030.

Here at COP we often hear the rhetoric of countries doing their “fair share”. It’s hard to quantify what our fair share is, exactly. But when even big and notoriously laggardly emitters such as the US have submitted better targets than us, it’s hard to justify our position. It’s clear that we are not actually holding up our end of the deal.

Bounded Flexibility

These negotiations have seen a proposal put forward by New Zealand in the spotlight. New Zealand proposes that countries each table a nationally determined intended contribution (ie how much they are prepared to reduce their emissions by), which will not be legally binding. The idea is that ambition of mitigation commitments will be increased over time from the beginning of the agreement until its purpose is achieved, subject to force majeure. Countries will be free to opt in and out whenever they like. The main argument for non-legally binding targets is that without the fear of being held to international law, governments are more likely to shoot for an ambitious emissions target. In addition, it is more likely that countries such as the US will be able to ratify the agreement if the targets are non binding.

In short, this proposal is awful. Non-binding targets mean that there is absolutely no accountability in the process – it’s the legal equivalent of the Wild West. There is no incentive for countries to live up to their stated commitments. There is no guarantee of getting to 2 degrees – it’s just talk, rhetoric. What would happen if our domestic laws weren’t legally binding?

Climate Finance

So far, New Zealand has committed $3 million to the Green Climate Fund. This is a pittance compared to New Zealand’s aid budget of $550 million, or our defence budget of $100 million.

To justify its position, New Zealand says that it wants to focus on mitigation, rather than adaptation. It’s true that mitigation is important, as the more we mitigate, the less need there will be to adapt. However, this view is simply not just. It is pure luck that we in New Zealand will not feel the effects of climate change as much as in other countries. Adaptation is vitally important from a climate justice perspective.

A common reason given for our inaction is that at less than 0.2% of the global total, New Zealand’s emissions are so small that it will make little or no measurable difference to the climate whether we reduce them or not. Although this is undeniably true, inaction is simply not a smart strategy. By not acting, we are missing out on important economic opportunities from positioning ourselves early. In addition, failure to act simply goes against basic moral intuitions. Everyone is affected, and everyone’s actions matter.

There are many more things I could criticise, such as the fact that the New Zealand Government has allowed the carbon price to crash to near zero, and the National Government’s total gutting of the Emissions Trading Scheme. But this blog post is long enough and my stream of anger is running out.

In conclusion, I urge our government to up its ambition and ditch its proposal for bounded flexibility. New Zealanders deserve better. Then I might have something to be proud of.

 

Negotiations have been going on for 20 years now, and next year the talks will truly come of age at COP 21, in Paris. There, negotiators have agreed to come to a new climate deal, which must apply to all states parties. Lima is crucial, as countries must come up with a draft text for the 2015 agreement in order to respect the procedural rules of the UN and leave enough time for countries to consider it before Paris.
So, just what are the key issues? What will NZYD be following closely during the next two weeks? And what do we think about it all? Read on.
The 2015 agreement
In Warsaw last year it was agreed that all parties will put forward proposals for their new emissions cuts, now known as “intended nationally determined contributions”, or INDCs.
A crucial issue is whether the Paris agreement will be legally binding, or merely a “soft law”, or political commitment that will not be binding under international law. Several countries, including Switzerland, the AOSIS (small island state) countries, Malta, Indonesia and Bangladesh are in favour of legally binding commitments. However, the US is not. New Zealand has put forward a proposal [link] whereby the agreement would not be legally binding, and proposed national contributions would be put forward in a schedule.
Closely linked to this issue is whether the new agreement will be bottom-up or top-down. Some parties want to select their own contributions depending on their national circumstances and capacities. This flexible, bottom-up approach aims to encourage universal participation from all Parties, and makes it easier for states like the US, which has to ratify any legally binding agreement through Congress. Other parties favour a top-down approach based on the latest scientific observations, and concepts like the carbon budget.
Another problem is whether and how there will be international consideration of INDCs. Countries are expected to put forward INDCs prior to the Paris conference, at the end of the first quarter of 2015 or as soon as is practicably possible thereafter. It is widely accepted that the total of the expected pre-Paris INDCs is very unlikely to come close to keeping the average global temperature increase below 2C. How can the agreement be strengthened in such a way that can bridge the gap between weak INDCs and the necessary emission reductions? One proposal is an ex-ante assessment process with two purposes: (1) assessing if individual INDCs are equitable and fair and (2) assessing if INDCs add up to enough emission reductions to stay below 2 degrees.
Yet another issue is the nature of INDCs themselves: should they include mitigation only, or adaptation and climate finance as well? This is a crucial issue for developing countries, who on the whole feel that they should be an all-inclusive package.
NZYD advocates for a fair, ambitious and binding agreement. We encourage the New Zealand Government to advocate for a fully binding agreement in the negotiations for a post-2020 agreement.
Adaptation
Countries disagree on whether new institutions, in addition to those set up under the Cancun Adaptation Framework, should be created for adaptation or not. Many developing countries take the view that new institutional arrangements should be put in place.
Pre-2020 action
Workstream 2 of the ADP will be continuing in Lima. One of its priorities will be to find concrete solutions to close the 2020 emissions gap, which is in the order of 8 to 12 gigatonnes of CO2.
For developing countries, this workstream is essential to confirm that developed countries are serious about reducing their emissions, and to create the climate of trust needed in the talks on the Paris agreement.
The issue of improving finance, technology transfer and capacity-building under workstream 2 will be the subject of debate in Lima, as well as the issue of raising the level of ambition of existing mitigation goals and ensuring that they are implemented.
A new version of the draft text on pre-2020 action was delivered during the most recent ADP session in October 2014, which should serve as a basis for negotiation in Lima.
Climate Finance
This is a serious and ongoing issue. In Copenhagen in 2009, parties pledged to deliver $100 bn per year to the Green Climate Fund (GCF) by 2020. Only $6.9 bn was available to the GCF in December 2013. This figure greatly fuelled the loss of confidence among developed and developing countries. Developing countries and NGOs are already labelling this COP as a “finance COP”, meaning that pressure will be on developed countries to deliver concrete finance in Lima.
NZYD urges the commitment of public finance from developed countries into the Green Climate Fund. Climate finance must be additional to existing climate and development financing, and not shifted from other environmental and development purposes. A broad range of contribution mechanisms is necessary, and these mechanisms must be adequate, sustainable and equitable.