For the first time in five years, world leaders are back in attempts to mobilize international negotiations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. An air of renewed optimism and anticipation pervaded the air as dignitaries took the United Nations stage on September 23, pledging to put climate change on the top of their agendas.
For Dr. Stephen Scharper, associate professor at the U of T School of the Environment, the conference represents a crucial moment for environmental policy.
“This conference will decide whether the world community can build a coalition of trust and accountability around climate change,” he said.
“There has been a new momentum in which people are now making the connection between violent patterns in weather and climate change,” said Scharper. “Fewer people are in denial about human engendered climate change. There is a chance for a new moment in this negotiation,” he added.
Previous climate change summits have been wrangled by negotiation deadlocks. The 2009 United Nations Copenhagen Climate Change Conference aimed to forge a new universal agreement for beyond 2020, the current date set for emission targets. However, negotiations failed, and the previous 2050 goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 80 per cent was abandoned.
Dr. Douglas MacDonald, senior lecturer at the U of T School of the Environment, believes that the results from this conference will be remarkably different from those of the failed Copenhagen summit in 2009.
MacDonald said that the results of this conference will assess the “ability of countries of the world to actually establish some form of global governance on the issue.”
“The 1997 Kyoto Protocol and United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Changes (UNFCCC) has had great difficulties, raising the possibility that we will not in any way be able to coordinate action,” MacDonald said. He believes that if this conference can extend UNFCCC and Kyoto agreements past 2020, these agreements will have force as international law.
Dr. Christian Abizaid, assistant professor at the Department of Geography and Centre for Environment, was a little more hesitant. Abizaid finds the large no-show roster rather disappointing. Numerous heads of state were absent at the conference, including Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minster Narendra Modi. These leaders represent not only the two most populous countries in the world but also the first- and third-largest producers of carbon dioxide emissions. Although Stephen Harper was in New York at that moment, he also chose not to attend the conference.
Abizaid also worries about the role of the industry and private corporations in climate change negotiations. If these entities do drive the agenda, they are more likely to protect their own interests than those of the planet.
At this point, it remains unclear whether the Summit will prove to be the cusp of change for environmental policy, or merely a spiral into further deadlock.
