Warsaw fails to deliver

Although developing countries compromise on climate change

Not much was expected from the global climate talks at Warsaw. And not much has been delivered. That said, negotiators from around 195 countries did at least stave off a Copenhagen-type fiasco, by working out a rather minimalist deal with some baby steps towards a cleaner environment. Among the positives is the creation of a mechanism for "loss and damage" that would rout climate change adaptation assistance to poorer countries from industrialised nations. This is merely a reconstructed version of the Green Climate Fund (GCF), which had failed to fully materialise. Only a handful of resource-rich countries actually came up with offers to donate around $100 million towards this mechanism, against the GCF's target of progressively raising annual funding to $100 billion a year by 2020. These nations are now required to begin pledging higher amounts by the next climate meet in Lima, Peru, in December 2014, before the review of progress on this count after three years.

In return, developing nations had to consent to a clause obliging all countries, regardless of their level of economic development, to "contribute" to the global climate rescue effort through "nationally-determined" emission cuts. What this means is that the term "commitments", which so far applied to targeted emission reductions by developed countries alone, now stands substituted by a watered-down "contribution" to curbing climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions - and applies to all. Also, emission reduction targets, which were hitherto determined globally through negotiations, will henceforth be fixed nationally and, therefore, voluntarily. This is a major relief for industrialised countries, most of which, barring a few European nations, have failed to meet their targets. Apart from this, the differentiation between developed and developing countries now stands diluted rather than strengthened.

A somewhat brighter spot is the forest sector. Developed countries pledged $280 million for projects aimed at curbing deforestation and forest degradation. This may help poorer nations show climate-oriented action by letting their forests remain in good shape to sequester carbon dioxide. The need to eliminate refrigerants like hydrochlorofluorocarbons was also shelved for the time being - developing countries can ill afford to phase out HCFCs without the availability of technically sound and economically viable alternatives.

Clearly, the death and destruction wreaked by Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines just ahead of the Warsaw meeting could not serve as the grim reminder to the negotiators of what was truly at stake. The consequences of inaction on global warming are indeed scary - from perilous extreme weather events like storms, floods and droughts to slow-creeping catastrophes such as desertification and sea level rises that would gobble up small island nations and coastlines. An opportunity for decisive action on global warming has, thus, been lost. The next two meets, in Lima in 2014 and in Paris in 2015, must progress towards crafting a binding climate change deal as a replacement for the moribund Kyoto protocol.