By: Ringo Bones
Ah, the 2012 Doha Climate Change Conference – as in Doha
2012 United Nations Climate Change Conference/COP18/CMP8 – could only be
defined as a “success” if you consider “promises” of the richest industrialized
countries would really translate to a guaranteed effort to reduce preventable greenhouse
gas emissions before some set date far off into the future. Well, even the
incumbent U.S. President Obama and his challenger Romney never even mentioned
the topic of climate change during their debates during the 2012 US Presidential
Elections so if the very act of other group of rich and powerful countries “promising”
to reduce their preventable greenhouse gas emissions makes you seem a tad
hopeful about the future, then good luck to you.
But the “game changer” of the 2012 Doha Climate Change
Conference was the devastation brought
by Typhoon Bopha to the Philippine shores back in December 3, 2012 that reignited
the very idea of climate change compensation or “Climate Change Aid” dominated
the second week of the Doha Climate Change Conference. This is where poor or
developing countries will be promised compensation by the rich or developed
countries for the damages caused by climate change.
The very idea of “Climate Change Aid” or “Climate Change
Compensation” has been around since the early 1990s when the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change was negotiated. In Doha during the 2012 UN Climate
Change Conference, a coalition of countries – including The People’s Republic
of China, The Alliance of Small Island States and the G77 Group of Developing
Countries pushed for it to be viewed.
They proposed a scheme that would decide when countries had
suffered climate harms and compensate them. It would be a form of insurance (or
derivatives – whichever is promised) and the greatest international aid scheme
ever. The idea eventually gained momentum during the second week of the Doha
Climate Change Conference after Typhoon Bopha struck the Philippines back in
December 3, 2012 and that country’s negotiator – Narderev “Yeb” Saño – broke down
in tears during a speech. And although developed nations had little incentive
to agree, the conference concluded with a promise to set something up next
year.
Compensation poses a fundamental challenge to climate
science – which still struggles to work out of trends and events are caused by
man-made preventable greenhouse gas emissions or would have happened anyway. “We
can’t say that an individual event was caused by climate change”, says Nigel
Arnell of the University of Reading, UK. “What we can do is say that the chance
of it happening was greater”. Sadly,
this very loophole of climate science not yet catching up with geopolitical
procedural rigmarole will be exploited by affluent countries to avoid
compensating - make that paying for climate change aid - the climate change
related events causing untold suffering in poorer countries.
