After 30 years of Cop, our ex-environment editor is now optimistic
In September 2006, shortly before the annual UN climate talks to be held that year in Nairobi, Kenya, I looked for hope amid the predictions of ecological collapse and the total failure of countries to act on emissions. It was hard going. The best I could manage was to argue that political, social and technological awareness of the climate crisis was growing and starting to translate into action. It was now a race between new ideas and political realities.
A personal revolution was taking place, I wrote. “See how far we have [all] come in a generation … Have you thought about installing solar panels or bought renewable energy? Have you chosen not to take a plane or bought a less powerful car? Have you voted for a political party or an individual because of their record on the environment? Have you tried to recycle more? Have you linked heatwaves and hurricanes with climate change, or wondered what kind of physical world your children will inhabit?”
Yes, it was thin, but then it seemed unlikely that an oil-addicted, carbon-illiterate world could, or even wanted to, ditch fossil fuels. Hopelessness was rife. Net zero was on few agendas. Renewable wind and solar power barely registered, and disinformation by denier and free-market thinktanks had paralysed the debate. Even the most cautious predictions warned of climate change accelerating fast as populations and wealth grew, with more extreme and unpredictable weather, sea level rises, water and food shortages, and effects on biodiversity.
I concluded: “Within most of our lifetimes there will be at least 2 billion more people – another China and a half – all being encouraged to consume as much oil, water, land, minerals, wood and stone as we in Britain do today. That will mean something like 1,000 times as many aeroplanes, 10 times as many cars and half as much food and water again being needed. Forget it. This will require several new planets.”
Worryingly, few people seemed to understand the scale of the catastrophe-in-waiting. That year, the Royal Society in London declared there was scientific consensus of man-made warming, the 692-page Stern review showed how it could lead to the greatest recession in history, and the then UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, told world leaders that those who questioned climate change were “out of step, out of arguments and out of time”.
But the media were barely interested enough to even send reporters to Nairobi, and it would be many years before the Murdoch empire, the BBC and even Channel 4 TV stopped giving equal air time to deniers.
Even worse, despite climate being on the international agenda since 1992, the Kyoto protocol – the only binding global treaty that stipulated cuts in greenhouse gas emissions – had been in force for a year and then only obliged a handful of industrialised countries to cut emissions by 5.2% on 1990 figures. Meanwhile, the world’s two largest emitters – China and the US – were not even signed up.
2006 was possibly the lowest point in attempts to get the world to reduce emissions. More than 6,000 diplomats and NGOs went to Cop12 in Nairobi in 2006 and saw the US, Australia and other countries delay and undermine progress. A modest last-minute consensus was scrabbled together to take forward a five-year “plan of action” that allowed the EU, US and other governments to congratulate themselves. The British environment secretary, David Miliband, returned from Africa to tell parliament that “good progress” had been made.
But to anyone outside the Cop bubble, progress had been negligible and ambition minimal. In truth, the talks were going at snail’s pace and a few rich countries that had helped create the climate crisis had once more chosen not to act decisively, nor provide the technology or the finance for others to help themselves. In the words of Greta Thunberg in 2021, the climate talks were just “blah, blah, blah”.
And most of those gloomy predictions have already become real. Since 2006, world population has grown 20%, or by more than 1 billion people. By 2050, it is expected to reach 9.7 billion, a 50% rise in just one generation. There are 500m more vehicles now than there were then and air passenger numbers have more than doubled. Instead of 1.2 billion people being affected by water shortages in 2005, there are now more than 3 billion. In that short time, too, CO2 emissions have risen nearly 23%, and the last decade has been the warmest on record. Meanwhile, many millions of people have died in natural disasters, there have been catastrophic fires, droughts, floods and heatwaves, and nature is in clear decline.
How Rio changed the world
Climate talks have been strained to breaking point since 1972 when the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm first put the issue on the international agenda. By 1992, when diplomats at the Earth summit in Rio de Janeiro started negotiating a treaty to cut emissions, the enmity between rich and poor nations was running deep. Nearly one in two people in heavily indebted Africa, Asia and Latin America were living in extreme poverty, while consumerism in the rich world was rampant. The north wanted to talk about the global atmosphere and the felling of forests in Brazil and Indonesia, but the rest of the world demanded they first talk about development and poverty. There was deep resentment at the inequalities and those gaps between countries have never fully closed.
By the time the then UK prime minister, John Major, arrived at the Riocentro convention halls in June 1992, weeks after being unexpectedly elected, any hope that cuts could be negotiated had been dashed. With the favelas in lockdown and military helicopters thundering up and down Copacabana and Ipanema beaches, US negotiators were under orders to water down previously-agreed positions to reduce greenhouse gases, and flatly refused to sign a treaty to protect biodiversity.
It was the shape of things to come. The US – responsible for one quarter of the world’s emissions – had decided there should be no binding targets or timetables for cuts, that only a paltry $75m should be given to the world’s 4 billion poor to help them adapt, that action to cut emissions should be delayed for at least eight years and be voluntary. It got its way.
Nevertheless, a weak climate convention was adopted and hailed by the rich world as a landmark agreement to save the planet. In truth it was almost meaningless and effectively ensured no action had to be taken for a decade.
But in one respect Rio did change the world. As tens of thousands of local Cariocas joined western environmentalists, indigenous peoples, charities, women’s and faith groups, poverty campaigners and youth, there was a real sense of an impatient global grassroots climate movement emerging, demanding action and giving a voice to nature as never before.
Two short speeches – one political, one emotional – captured the Rio mood. The Cuban president, Fidel Castro, expressed the anger felt by the south at the rich countries’ abuse of nature. “An important biological species – humankind – is at risk of disappearing due to the rapid and progressive elimination of its natural habitat. It must be said that consumer societies are chiefly responsible … They have poisoned the seas and the rivers. They have polluted the air. They have saturated the atmosphere with gases, altering climatic conditions with the catastrophic effects we are already beginning to suffer,” he said to thunderous applause at the opening session, before ending: “Enough of selfishness. Enough of schemes of domination. Enough of insensitivity, irresponsibility and deceit. Tomorrow will be too late to do what we should have done a long time ago.”
The second speech came a few days later, from 1992’s equivalent of Greta Thunberg. The 12year-old Severn Suzuki, daughter of one of Canada’s best-known environmentalists, shamed world leaders, saying: “I am only a child, yet I know if all the money spent on war was spent on finding environmental answers ending poverty and in finding treaties, what a wonderful place this Earth would be.”
A third speech is possibly apocryphal, but has been quoted widely and has came to define the direction of future climate talks. A combative George HW Bush, leader of the world’s remaining superpower, flew to Rio on Air Force One for 24 hours and declared the US to be the world’s leading environmental nation, reportedly adding that “the American way of life is not up for negotiation. Period.”
It was a reality check for optimists and from then on, the US was cast as the leading climate villain, a role it has played in most talks since.
Unspectacular progress … until Paris
In the 29 years since Rio, CO2 emissions have risen nearly 60% and are still rising, leaving some commentators to argue that the meetings are a circus, and because so few cuts have been made negotiations should be ditched in favour of radically different talks outside the UN process.
The opposing argument is that blame for consistent failure should not be put on the complex, inclusive UN process, so much as the lack of political will from big emitters to act. Climate change is a global issue, so everyone must have a say and consensus via the UN is the last best hope to progress, it is said.
Both arguments have merit. The talks have indeed been marked by mistrust and rancour but also by extraordinary initiatives and great gatherings of civil society. All meetings since 2001 have run overtime, many ending at dawn with last-ditch compromises, brinkmanship and dramatic rescues from abject failure.
Angela Merkel, the then 38-yearold German environment minister who chaired the first Conference of the parties (Cop1) in Berlin in 1995, is said to have single-handedly pushed through proposals for what would become the Kyoto protocol, the cornerstone of all international action on global warming. Two years later, John Prescott, the British environment secretary, is credited with taking charge at Kyoto in Japan and banging heads together to secure an agreement to bind developed countries to cuts of about 5% by 2012. Disaster loomed on the final night of Cop17 in 2011 in Durban until, in a moment of genius, the South African presidency employed a traditional African mediation technique known as an indaba to bring together opposing people in small huddles.
There have been villains, too. Bernarditas Muller, lead negotiator for China and the developing countries group, was widely disliked by western negotiators but admired by developing nations for her refusal to be bullied into watering down legal commitments. Al Gore, awarded the Nobel prize in 2007 for his work on climate, was the lead US negotiator in 1997 who demanded loopholes to allow rich countries to buy their cuts from poor countries, so evading the moral responsibility to act themselves. Saudi Arabia, Canada and Australia have all been accused regularly of trying to wreck, block or dilute commitments.
But despite the dramas, most Cops since Berlin have only managed to grind out unspectacular progress. Cop6 in The Hague in 2001 failed to agree anything significant at all; Cop8 in Delhi may be remembered merely for agreeing to call for technology transfer; Cop11 in Canada just extended the life of the Kyoto protocol beyond 2012; Cop16 called for developing countries to be handed $100bn a year to adapt. The lowest point may have been in 2009 when Cop15 in Copenhagen descended into chaos and recrimination as rich countries were found negotiating secret deals. High points such as Cop21 in Paris in 2015, when a new treaty was signed binding all nations to make cuts, are very much the exception.
The cause of a generation
And yet. Despite the snail’s pace and the failures, I am far more optimistic now than in 1992 or 2006. In the early climate talks, the science was a side issue for many countries and negotiations were a political battleground, with groups of like-minded countries playing out ideological agendas to maintain influence or economic domination. For years, the US, EU and UK splashed foreign aid to keep former colonies onside and tried to prevent China from growing its economy. Equally, China could “buy” the support of countries with promises to invest in their economies. Now all governments have plans and self-interest today is redefined as rapid decarbonisation.
In just 15 years, too, there has been a renewable power revolution, led by solar and wind. Green hydrogen is now roughly where solar was in 1992, and battery storage technologies and marine power are developing fast. With China no longer funding foreign coal plants and electric car sales taking off, the end of fossil fuels is nearly in sight. It will not be enough to hold temperatures to a rise of 1.5C-2C, but the revolution has started.
There are other reasons to be optimistic. Every country has now had a taste of climate change. Social media, too, has sharpened the world spotlight and leaders will not want to return from Glasgow empty-handed or be branded as climate laggards or wreckers.
Money issues, so long a stumbling block in the talks, may now be resolved,
too. Since Covid, which has already cost countries trillions of dollars, the $100bn a year pledged but not provided by rich countries in 2009 to help vulnerable countries adapt does not look that much. The Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero alone has brought together hundreds of the world’s biggest banks and finance groups. To not find the money now would only make countries look cruel and self-destructive.
Above all, that global hunger for action, which I first saw expressed in Rio 29 years ago, is now insatiable. The fight for the climate has become the cause of a generation, joined by worldwide movements of youth, indigenous peoples, faith and justice groups, businesses and local governments. Climate now embraces science, human rights, health, environmental justice, race, gender and equity. The arguments have been won, the science is certain, the solutions found, and people want progress. There’s still far to go, but the future is not set in stone as it appeared to be in 2006 – the old walls of doubt are crumbling, the momentum is building and there will be no going back from Glasgow.
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