The global warming we are witnessing today is believed to be the result of greenhouse gases accumulated in the atmosphere over the past 150 years. For at least the first hundred years, GHG emissions came almost exclusively from the United States, Canada, Japan, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe. Even in 1990, when many countries in Asia and Africa had industrialized, this group of some 30 countries accounted for more than 60% of accumulated emissions since 1850, according to the World Resources dataset. Institute, based in Washington.
When the world first became aware of the need to cope with global warming and climate change in the early 1990’s, it was considered fair that those who had created the problem were responsible for cleaning up the disaster. The “polluter pays” principle has just been introduced, widely accepted in environmental legislation around the world these days, which had been included in the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Climate.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, was also the son of the same Rio conference. The UNFCCC was born in 1994, with the mandate to find a solution to the problem of climate change. It divided the world into two major groups: countries that had to reduce GHG emissions and those that did not. The 37 countries that were supposed to reduce emissions were named in Annex I to the Convention and became known as “Annex I” countries. The rest of the world was the ‘non-annexed countries’.
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The division was made by unanimous decision and was considered fair. It helped make Annex I countries richer and more capable and therefore better placed to make emission reductions, which could not be achieved without somehow restricting economic activity.
It was not as if non-annexed countries had to do anything. The UNFCCC realized and stressed that climate change was a global problem and needed to be addressed with a global effort. Once emitted, GHGs could not be restricted to a particular country or region and added to the global concentration in the atmosphere. Therefore, non-annexed countries were also expected to act on climate change, take adaptation measures and act quickly to move towards a low-carbon growth trajectory. However, mandatory emission cuts were something they were supposed to be exempt from, at least in the short term.
This established the principle of differentiation, through the expression ‘Common But Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities’ (CBDR-RC), in the UNFCCC. CBDR-RC has been at the center of talks on climate change since then, and has also been the cause of a lot of heartburn in recent times.
Annex I countries did not have many objections to the CBDR in the early years – the non-annexed world swears even now – and the Kyoto Protocol could be negotiated in just three years after the creation of the UNFCCC. The Kyoto Protocol, now in its final years, called on Annex I countries to collectively reduce their GHG emissions by at least 5% below their 1990 levels by 2012. The countries received individual goals to achieve this overall goal.
It was a very modest goal, but when the Kyoto Protocol entered into force in 2005, Annex I countries had turned against it and had begun to feel clearly uncomfortable with the CBDR. The economic implications of this agreement had begun to emerge. The aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis was still being felt, and many Western countries were unwilling to put restrictions on their economies for a global cause that had no direct and immediate benefits.
China’s rapid growth from the 1990s onwards had also begun to hurt Western interests. Stricter emission standards for their industries would have made their products even more uncompetitive with Chinese products. It helped that China’s emissions had also risen rapidly, and by 2007, China had overtaken the United States as the world’s largest emitter of GHGs.
Although the Annex I countries continued to provide word of mouth to CBDR, they had clearly had enough. The United States refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and, for the first time since the birth of the UNFCCC, began to play a proactive role in shaping global architecture on climate change. The argument was that without restricting emissions from China — and from India, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, etc. — an effective fight against global warming could not be initiated.
The CBDR, as enshrined in the UNFCCC, had its final outcry at the 2007 climate conference in Bali. It was unanimously agreed that Annex I nations should not only reduce emissions, but also provide funding and technology to the developing world. The Bali roadmap for a new climate treaty was broader and more comprehensive than the Kyoto Protocol. The treaty was to be finalized in Copenhagen in 2009.
But Copenhagen collapsed, mainly due to strong opposition from Annex I countries, mainly the US, Australia, Japan, Canada and a few others, to perpetuating a Kyoto-type agreement. Soon after, some of these countries, such as Japan, Australia, and Canada, abandoned the Kyoto Protocol.
Then began a concerted effort to tear down the CBDR wall. It was argued that the years 2010 were very different from the 1990s and without the action of all countries, there was no hope of success in the fight against climate change. Developed countries continued to wear the cloak of morality and were careful not to completely rule out the idea of differentiation. But they were clear that they would not be the only ones carrying the burden of mitigating the impacts of climate change.
With the most powerful countries and the most resources aligned on one side, there was no doubt that they would do it their way. After several rounds of negotiations, persuasion and even threats, the current wording – from which a new agreement is due in Paris next month – was decided in Durban in 2013. Now all countries had to take demonstrable measures, the quantum and extent of which was to be decided by the country itself. The only difference was the implicit understanding that developed countries would necessarily make emission cuts. But the quantum of these cuts, again, had to be self-determined and not assigned in a similar way to Kyoto. It doesn’t matter that, unlike the Kyoto mechanism, which set emission reduction targets for a global goal, this one-size-fits-all approach is unlikely to be appropriate, and it currently isn’t. This formulation was called ‘Nationally Determined Forecast Contributions’, or INDC, another addition to the large number of acronyms in the Dictionary of Climate Change.
While developing countries have seen the CBDR wall almost completely torn down, the attack on the developed world has continued, sometimes through attempts to expand the list of countries that can be tasked with providing international funding to do so. in the face of climate change, others through a barely disguised desire to undo the 1994 Convention.
