In past international conferences like next month’s COP21 (21st Conference of the Parties under the UN Framework Conference for Climate Change), the participants began by saying why they thought that the conference might not succeed and then went on to state why they believed it should. The reality preceded the morality.
Today, on the eve of COP21, the situation is different. The participants, who will represent the 195 countries that have agreed to participate are saying loudly that they deeply believe that COP21 will be a success and then have gone on to say that getting there will be an arduous journey. A different perception of reality followed the same morality.
I personally have a good feeling about the success prospects of COP21. I think that the biggest international conference convened outside the UN will end with an agreement that will represent vital progress in the struggle to halt the march of climate change. On the eve of its opening, the following, in my view, are factors militating to make COP21 a success.
The first is the enormous pall of disappointment, frustration, even guilt, shrouding COP21 in the wake of the failure of the two immediately preceding international climate change conferences, to wit, those held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and in Copenhagen in 2009. A learned commentary that I read recently on COP21’s prospects suggested that one of the two greatest fears of the conference’s organizers were a repetition of the worldwide feeling of letdown that followed Rio and Copenhagen.
Undoubtedly that sentiment exists today, and that is why the organizers of COP 21 have been working very hard to try and ensure that it will be a case of third-time-lucky for the worldwide effort against climate change. The world can only hope that they have learned and will avoid the mistakes of Rio and Copenhagen and have crafted, at last, proposals that, going forward, are realistic and acceptable to the affected sectors of the 195 societies that will be represented in Paris.
The second factor working for the success of COP21 is the series of devastating climate change-related events that have taken place since 2009. True, hurricane Katrina, which happened in 2006, apparently failed to infuse a feeling of extreme urgency into the world’s political and business power centers, but Typhoon Yolanda almost certainly will succeed in doing so. A video about Yolanda and post-typhoon Tacloban City need to be shown at the Paris gathering.
A third big factor favoring a successful COP21 outcome is the early-2015 joint declaration, made by the leaders of the world’s two leading carbon-emissions sources, the US and China, to set realistic limits to those emissions and, more important, to work in unison for the success of COP21.
Last, but very definitely not least, will be the presence in Paris of Presidents Barack Obama and Xi Jinping and the leasers of India, Australia and the other major sources of carbon emissions. Their presence in the French capital will say a lot. They will be making a joint political statement about the worldwide need for nations to finally come together to halt the advance of climate change. It is noteworthy that the Presidents of the US, China and the other industrial countries were not present in Rio or Copenhagen.
For these reasons I have, to repeat, a good feeling about the outcome of COP21. For the sake of humankind and of future generations, I pray that my feeling will be borne out. The readers of this column hopefully will join me in this prayer.
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