ACCID RSS newsfeed

A hundred Copenhagens could not bring the changes we need

23 December 2009, Business Day
URL: http://allafrica.com/stories/200912220479.html

Johannesburg:  On Friday the world watched as the United Nations climate change conference came to a close. With all the talk of looming temperature increase and irreparable damage, many were hoping for an ambitious agreement that would save the planet. It was not to be. The outcome barely qualifies as an agreement and even less as ambitious.

Ever since the first UN Conference on Human Environment in 1972, awareness of climate change and the need for a sustainable solution has increased exponentially as political groups such as the Club of Rome led to the formation of intergovernmental panels and international climate forums.

With more than 10-million having watched Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth, 5200 rallies in 181 countries being held on the International Day of Climate Action in October , and the recent editorial published in 56 newspapers reaching a global readership of 500-million, the issue has received extensive media attention.

Hundreds of "climate change" summits and conferences have been organised all over the world, with the messianic Copenhagen gathering as the highlight: the 45000 registered attendants turned the Danish capital into a Woodstock for protectors of the planet. It is certainly not a lack of "awareness" keeping us from changing the future.

Nevertheless, we have yet to see real results. In the editorial published on the opening day of the conference, the writers call "not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics.... Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone." By now we can conclude that what many had "hopenhagened" for did not happen.

Based on Copenhagen 's outcomes , no number of summits before 2020 would achieve the goal of limiting the rise in temperature by 2050. It shows that the summit as a vehicle towards a sustainable future has failed.

What we need instead is not so much a "radical new system", but rather a revaluation of the system's constraints which are holding us back. We need to realise that the fragmented nature of our current system -- the nation state coupled with the opportunism of the market economy -- cannot produce the collective response needed to tackle climate change.

Both the nation state and the market economy are based on an organising principle whereby partial interests seek a competitive advantage over each other. In such a system, the recognition of an opportunity inspires a race to action, while the identification of a risk seems to produce a collective paralysis, where each party waits for the next to make the first move. In this context, a "leap of faith" is often the hardest move to make, even if it promises ample economic rewards. It can be argued that the majority of social welfare breakthroughs -- decent working conditions, the abolition of child and slave labour, women's rights -- only happened by going against the grain of a primary competitive logic.

Take the politics of mid- 19th century US: plagued by the divisive response to the abolition of slavery, the South remained dependent on farming, which was only profitable due to the exploitation of slave labour, while the Northern states had begun to invest in transport, technology, industry and communications and therefore had an economy that could withstand such a loss. In the South, economic and political decisions were made by plantation owners that operated as an oligarchy and protected slavery as an institution based on profits gained, leaving little room for any moral argument. The refusal of the South to abolish slavery was not based on a lack of moral obligation, but on an economic dependence. Doesn't the same apply to addressing climate change?

Copenhagen has brought to the foreground the fact that the potential of the world to address transnational concerns is limited. There is still a huge divide between the advanced state of various transnational initiatives and the strenuous political process required to come to consensus.

Copenhagen has proven that when it comes to addressing climate change, we cannot rely on the good intentions of individual nations and their leaders. In the end, the question is an economic one and will have to be addressed outside current confines of generic ad campaigns, endless summits, and unrealised treaties. Even climate sceptics cannot deny the potential economic and geopolitical gains. Thus we are challenged to use the desire to combat climate change as an impetus for change in our economy.

Despite the honest attempts to date, the disappointing result of the conference demonstrates that we need to push the boundaries of what may have to change to actually address the problem - it might be a lot more than we currently conceive. We can't blame the leaders, as they were confronted with a Gordian Knot - forced to defend the interests and competitive advantage of their own individual nations. The limitations of the market economy and the nation state inhibit collaboration and restrict the scale of response.

These institutions themselves are the fundamental reasons why the call to action published on December 7 cannot be answered. After all, it is not just a problem of polluting the atmosphere - in a way, our economy and many international geopolitical struggles are based on the market's dependence on carbon dioxide emission and individual nations' desire to protect the market.

Undeniably, addressing climate change is a transnational problem, and therefore an effective response can only be achieved within a framework larger than the nation state. However, a new world council or global initiative would result in the same frustration that now lingers from Copenhagen.

What we need is a form of governance which transcends the sovereignty of the nation state but still remains an effective vehicle to claim specific domains, which need to be addressed on a higher level.

Climate change could effectively be addressed on a regional scale using existing infrastructure, such as Asean (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations), Mercosur (the Southern Common Market) and the European Union, all of which have a track record of major transnational achievements such as the creation of a single monetary union and an integrated regulated market.

Empowering these bodies financially and institutionally could make them an efficient instrument in combating climate change. In such a scenario, energy planning and security would be removed from exclusively national sovereignty, and transferred to a regional body, of which the nation is an integral part, having and sharing responsibility at the same time.

In the end, it could well be the institutions most overlooked in recent years that could prove to be the unexpected saviours of our planet.

*  Reinier De Graaf is partner in the firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture, and the director of its think tank and research studio, AMO.