DESPITE the bombings in London last week, the G8 show at Gleneagles in Scotland carried on as billed. While the deal on African aid and debt relief was broadly welcomed, G8 leaders’ position on climate change was generally dismissed as a fudge.
Yet the agreement they reached may have begun to create the political momentum for a climate deal to replace the Kyoto protocol which expires in 2012. The sting in the tail is that such a deal is unlikely to include legally binding national targets for greenhouse gas emissions.
The Gleneagles communiqué pledged the G8 nations to “act with resolve and urgency” on climate change. It was less specific about how to act. Bob May, the president of London’s Royal Society and former chief scientific adviser to Tony Blair, pointed out that it “conspicuously failed to mention even the need for targets to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases”.
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Blair’s position is that by avoiding targets the US has been brought back into climate talks. “If we do not have the US, India and China as part of the dialogue, there is no possibility of succeeding in resolving this issue,” he said after the summit. The US has agreed to meet its fellow G8 members plus China, India, Brazil and South Africa in the UK in November to discuss climate change. This meeting will set the scene for formal UN talks, which begin in Montreal, Canada, in December, on what should replace the Kyoto protocol’s emissions targets.
Many environmentalists in the US had hoped that the G8 would isolate Bush over climate change. But in London, diplomats see Gleneagles as giving his administration a face-saving way back into the fold. The Montreal meeting will have to decide whether to renew the protocol after 2012, with new targets, or to start afresh under the much less specific UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, as the US would prefer (91av, 28 May, p 12). Signed at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, this commits most nations to preventing “dangerous” climate change.
The UK has also been pushing this line for a while. Earlier this year, senior climate negotiator Henry Derwent told a European Union climate meeting: “We must accept [that] an alternative to the target-and-trading approach might be necessary.”
The G8 leaders won more praise for their moves to tackle poverty in Africa, although they were still criticised by some for not going further. They agreed to provide $50 billion aid a year by 2010 and to cancel around $40 billion of debt owed by 18 of the world’s poorest countries, 15 of them in Africa, and the eventual reduction of trade barriers to African exports. The figure was only half that originally proposed by the UK, and the development charity Oxfam says only $20 billion was genuinely new money, representing less than $30 per person across the continent.
Calestous Juma, an expert on international development at Harvard University, told 91av that the aid would help Africa put science and technology at the centre of development. “Africa is singing to a new tune: one that focuses on competence building and not traditional charity and relief.”
UN secretary-general Kofi Annan was even more upbeat. “I hope Gleneagles will be remembered as the beginning of something very big, perhaps even the beginning of the end of mass poverty.”
