Australia can’t lead from behind on climate

Under the heat of the pre-election spotlight, APEC’s Sydney declaration on climate change has been dressed up as historic progress. Most leaders heading home will see it as little more than a watered down compromise.

APEC’s failure to achieve even an “aspirational” target to cut greenhouse pollution has allowed President Bush retreat from his July G8 commitment to “consider seriously … at least a halving of global emissions by 2050”.

Just a week before APEC, a high-level United Nations meeting in Vienna concluded global emissions must be halved by 2050 in order to avoid dangerous climate change.

APEC has let the US go backwards and hasn’t helped China move forward.

In a nutshell, the APEC declaration was the end product of a collision of two positions: the push for voluntary, global commitments on climate and the drive towards mandatory targets, applied to developed countries ahead of developing countries.

Australia and the US have persistently argued for the voluntary model. When they rail against Kyoto, they are primarily opposing the protocol’s mandatory targets.

Australia and the US would have hoped to use APEC to build support for the proposal that voluntary measures form the basis for the post-2012 framework. And although they managed to squeeze in a commitment to “work to achieve a common understanding on a long-term aspirational global emissions reduction goal”, they where also forced to “call for a post-2012 international climate change arrangement … that strengthens, broadens and deepens the current arrangements and leads to reduced global emissions of greenhouse gases”.

For “current arrangements” read “Kyoto Protocol” and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

If the language in the declaration was a bit subtle, the statements from China and Malaysia were not. Chinese President Hu Jintao was quoted as having told Prime Minister John Howard that the UN framework and the Kyoto Protocol were “the most authoritative, universal and comprehensive international framework” for tackling climate change.

And Malaysian Trade Minister Rafidah Aziz suggested that Australia and the US lacked the credibility to lead discussions on climate change. “If you want to talk about climate change, please join in with the rest of the global community to make commitments about managing climate change … there’s no point talking outside of the (Kyoto) forum,” she said.

It’s not as if we don’t know what needs to be done about climate change. The science is saying if the world wants a better than one-in-four chance of avoiding dangerous climate change, global emissions must fall by at least 50 per cent by 2050.

I know we need better odds than that to guard against the long list of climate change impacts emerging from climate scientists around the world.

It’s worth remembering that the 1991 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, signed by almost every country - including China, Australia and the US - committed to achieve: “stabilisation of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”.

That’s pretty much the same as what the APEC Declaration commits to work towards … 16 years later.

The Kyoto Protocol was established precisely because the “aspirational” commitment in the 1991 framework failed to halt the spiralling rise in global greenhouse pollution. Binding targets are the way to cut emissions.

The weakness of the APEC Sydney Declaration is a sober reminder to Australians that being one of the two developed countries that refuses to ratify Kyoto carries a high cost.

Having refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, we only have observer status in the crucial post-2012 discussions in Bali in December this year.

The threats of dangerous climate change - more severe droughts, heatwaves, bushfires and cyclones - and the annual $3.8 billion loss of Australian business opportunities, because we cannot gain credits under the Kyoto Protocol’s carbon trading mechanisms, are strong reasons for Australia to reconsider its role as a Kyoto blocker.

If you don’t have a seat at the table, you don’t have a say in the outcome. It’s time for Australia to do the right thing by the rest of the world - and by future generations - and ratify the Kyoto Protocol before the post-2012 climate negotiations in December.