14 December, 2009
The ICEM has participated at events each day of the Conference of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and will continue to do so.
Find below a brief report from each day.
6 December: COP15 is the 15th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. As many as 400 trade union representatives from around the world will be here in Copenhagen to make the case for working people. COP15 is considered to be a particularly important Conference of the Parties, since the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012, and COP15 is supposed to be the Conference at which a successor to the Kyoto Protocol is agreed upon, or at least substantially mapped out. There is a sense of urgency since the most recent assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is bleak. The world must act quickly.
The earth is a high-tech animated, illuminated model of the earth at the USA pavillion that can display multiple climate variables
The ICEM says that we need a fair, ambitious and binding agreement on greenhouse gas emissions to deal with the problem of climate change. However, an agreement that fails to include a strategy for job creation, job protection, and a Just Transition plan, will fail to create a sustainable future. It cannot be jobs versus the environment. It must be both, or it will ultimately be neither.
7 December: COP-15 officially opened today, with the expected chaos at the registration tables as tens of thousands of official negotiators, observers, and press tried to obtain the badges that would allow them to pass through the tight security.
At the first plenary session on "Longterm Cooperative Action", there were no surprises as both rich, developed nations and poorer, developing nations staked out their initial positions.
One thing is certain: when the bill for environmental collapse comes due, it is ordinary people - workers, their families, and the communities that depend on them - that will pay the price. Another path is possible, a path that seeks prosperity and sustainability through the transformation of existing jobs and the creation of a greener economy. Do we have the wisdom to choose it?
8 December: The big news of today was a "leaked" draft final agreement that allegedly was produced by the Danish Prime Minister's office in consultation with other countries. Presumably, it is meant to be a fall-back agreement should the two weeks of COP15 fail to reach a substantive agreement. As such, it proposes no firm greenhouse gas emissions targets, no defined levels of financial assistance for developing countries, and is stripped of all references to social impacts including sustainable jobs or Just Transition. Most alarmingly, it raises the possibility that years of work leading up to this conference may be by-passed in the last minute, simply to have something signed at the end. Obviously this is unacceptable. As this story evolved, it emerged that there are several alternate texts being prepared or circulated outside of the "official" process.
Michael Cutajar, the chair of the "Ad-Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action"
9 December: a Wednesday, 9 December, meeting. The Ad-hoc Working Group on Longterm Cooperative Action released a new version of its "Shared Vision" paper, and a key demand of labour - a paragraph on Just Transition - is retained, so far. In the plenary meetings, much of the discussion was about financing, with several proposals to fold funding for climate mitigation and adaptation into overall aid funds, and allow it to be managed by "international financial institutions" such as the World Bank. Costa Rica and Tuvalu proposed fairly strong emissions reduction targets for both developed, and developing countries. This has at least temporarily split the G77 group of countries, as a number of members of that group were opposed to the proposal.
10 December: 10 December was a day of many closed-door meetings and rumours. On labour's key paragraph (in the "Shared Vision" document of the working group on Longterm Cooperative Action) covering decent work and Just Transition, there was support from Argentina, the EU, and the US, but the paragraph is still vulnerable to hostile amendments or outright deletion. This is the wording so far:
"Realizing that harmonizing sustainable development while addressing climate change and demands for a more equitable utilization of the global atmospheric resource necessitate a paradigm shift that adjusts global economic growth patterns towards a [low-emission] [high-growth] sustainable climate-resilient development, based on innovative technologies and more sustainable production and consumption, while ensuring a just transition of the workforce which creates decent work and quality jobs, and seeking the active participation of all stakeholders be they governmental, including subnational and local government, private business or civil society, including the youth, and addressing the need for gender equity."
The "Fossil of the Day" is awarded by environmental groups to the country or countries that have been the worst behaved that day in their opinion
11 December: At today's plenary meeting of the Adhoc Working Group on Longterm Cooperative Action, "labour's paragraph" (discussed in yesterday's dispatch) survived - at least in concept - and will likely be retained in the final report of the "Shared Vision"! As several amendments were proposed labour must be cautious in our celebration until a final version of the paragraph emerges. However, this is an important milestone, and testimony to the effectiveness of many months of preparatory work and a week of lobbying here at COP15. We must now get to work to make sure the final version contains acceptable wording, and that politicians talk about it when the Copenhagen outcomes are announced.
In other fora, debate continued between developed and developing countries over targets and financing.
ITUC Copenhagen Reports here.