Good COP/Bad COP? You've guessed it... (COP 15)

20 Dec 2009 – Geoff Lye

As recently as last Thursday I was genuinely optimistic for a substantive outcome: not perfect, not legally binding, but a clear and universally adopted political agreement laying out the roadmap and global governance needed to ‘avoid the unmanageable and to manage the unavoidable’ impacts of climate change. But reality has cut in and what we are left with is an unequivocally bad COP outcome.

Pre-Copenhagen, various climate-passionate commentators predicted – and even promoted – a failure in the talks. Most notably, James Hansen in an article earlier this month suggested that the inevitable diluting effect of achieving global political consensus would undermine the radical shifts society needs to make. In the article, he suggests that dealing with climate change allows no room for the compromises that rule the world of elected politics. “This is analagous to the issue of slavery faced by Abraham Lincoln or the issue of Nazism faced by Winston Churchill,” he said. “On those kind of issues you cannot compromise. You can’t say let’s reduce slavery, let’s find a compromise and reduce it 50% or reduce it 40%.”

Similarly, another astute observer, Paul Gilding, argues in Why Copenhagen will fail and why that doesn’t matter that the very best outcome in terms of the ceiling level of GHG concentrations in the atmosphere would still carry too high a risk of dangerous climate change and would, therefore, be a distraction from the real scale of change needed.

In any event, we now have the final Accord as ‘noted’ by the Conference Parties in the final session yesterday. From the business community’s perspective, it clearly fails to deliver the ‘predictability through the adoption of medium- and long-term realistic and ambitious objectives’ and ‘clear, simple and flexible processes’ they argued for in their final intervention on Friday. They also noted: ‘We can deliver emissions reductions and adaptation solutions, given a global and inclusive agreement – to drive innovation and stimulate private sector investment in efficient and low-emitting technologies, and to speed up the deployment of existing and advanced technologies’.

The truth, of course, is that businesses – all businesses – can deliver (as, indeed many are already delivering) significant emissions cuts whether or not the Accord is translated into a legal post-Kyoto protocol and with or without the incentives called for by business. As I suggested in my 13 December blog below, if the 1,000 most carbon intensive global companies de-carbonised their full value chain in the way that Walmart has committed to do on a voluntary basis, we would only need support from the UN for frameworks and processes to help accelerate the necessary investments and reward those proactively reducing their emissions. [Intern support in researching this further is still needed – contact me, lye@sustainability.com, if interested].

When history is written, I fear that COP 15 will be shown to have been the single greatest barrier to unilateral action by whole sectors of society as they have held back to await the certainty that a post Kyoto protocol promised to deliver. The biggest question now is what businesses will choose to do now that they do not have the predictability they had sought. I fear another year at least of continued equivocation. At minimum, however, every business should now set the 2 degree ceiling to average temperature increase which has been agreed at COP 15 as the guiding reference for their medium and long term climate strategies. Few companies, in our experience, have been willing to explore the profound implications of seeing their future through this lens. The lens needs to acknowledge both the business and the moral imperatives for making business decisions today which align with a 2 degree outcome. And to do so too through the lenses both of mitigation (reducing the emissions throughout a company’s value chain) and adaptation (protecting their assets and stakeholders from the adverse consequences even a 2 degree outcome will deliver).

Speaking of unilateral action, I bumped into David Buckland of Cape Farewell at Copenhagen airport. He had spent most of his time at the COP 15 Mayors’ Event and was impressed by the scale of unilateral action being taken at the city level. With over 70% of emissions predicted to come from cities and with a shift in urban populations from the current 50% to 75% of humankind by 2050, city level actions can have a dramatic effect on total global emissions. As we wake up to the cold reality of 2010 without any clear global agreement, the time has surely come for unilateral vision , courage and action at the city, at the citizen – and especially at the corporate level.