On the 12th day...12 drums a-drumming and a climate deal
Mon, 14 Dec 2015 15:07:00 GMT
The Paris Climate Talks (COP21) reached their conclusion at the weekend and the resulting agreement has been widely welcomed. It certainly looks promising - gaining consensus from nearly 200 countries on the importance of anthropogenic climate change and the impacts it will have on all of us, and what we should do about it, is a major success.
The agreement seeks to limit warming to below 2C with the hope of keeping it well below that at 1.5C. Only a few weeks ago agreement on this target would have seemed unlikely, given the diversity of the global stakeholders. This ambitious goal is truly to be welcomed.
Although it might appear churlish in this advent season to be critical of Paris’s gift to the world, there are some significant areas of concern. The framework for how this will be achieved includes very few specific targets, the timetable for monitoring progress is rather vague, and the methods lack transparency. Compromises have been made on how to deal with shared responsibility and on finance for mitigation and adaptation and these might cause problems in the future. And, possibly more worrying than anything, there is a seeming lack of urgency – with nothing really happening until 2020. The agreement will depend on engaged and proactive governments throughout the world, and as we all know, governments can change and priorities can be juggled. Even in a reasonably stable country like the UK we can see how politics can get in the way of progressive sustainable policies with recent decisions on green initiatives made by David Cameron’s government seeming to contradict his rhetoric.
However, we need to be positive and ambitious. Paris has witnessed the power of civil society and we need to capitalise and build on that that. The Paris agreement has given us a new opportunity to achieve a sustainable planet and we cannot take any chances.
On the twelfth day of Christmas Paris has given us the opportunity to march to a different drum beat. All of us, everywhere, need to get behind the drummers so that we can all march together for a sustainable future.
Happy Christmas!
