Cancun's white beaches and resort hotels provide a fitting setting for a global argument over the rich world's responsibility for damaging the Earth's environment and the extent of its “climate debt” to poorer nations.
Divisions between the rich and poor – so apparent in such sunny vacation spots – have fuelled bitter debates that threaten to block progress at the United Nations climate summit under way on the Mayan Riviera.
Many leaders from the developing world and Western activists are demanding trillion-dollar reparations for the developed world's damage to the Earth's atmosphere at the expense of the poor. Their argument is an extension of the anti-globalization, anti-corporate credo that assigns moral blame for the vast gap in global living standards.
Representatives from developing countries arrived at Cancun determined to hold rich nations to account for their role in causing what scientists say is a growing climate crisis, one that will hit poor nations the hardest.
However, the United States and the European Union are mired in the worst economic slump since the Great Depression. The heightened level of economic insecurity – and the perception that China is overtaking Western economies – will make it increasingly difficult for those governments to win public support for massive climate-related transfers to developing countries that would have been politically problematic even before the global slump.
At Cancun, negotiators hope to conclude some “building block” agreements on issues of financing and technology transfer that will pave the way for an overarching, binding climate treaty down the road.
Below, a guide to issues, and conflicts, that stand in the way.
Carbon debt
The recognition of differing levels of responsibility between developed and developing countries has been embedded for decades in international agreements that deal with the growing climate crisis.
Based on 160 years of fossil-fuelled economic growth, the industrialized world has emitted an estimated 75 per cent of the man-made greenhouse gases that remain trapped in the atmosphere.
Globally, energy-related emissions have climbed to 29 billion tonnes a year from 200 million tonnes in 1850 as the developed world relied on coal-fired electricity and oil-fuelled transportation to deliver unprecedented prosperity to its citizens.
Governments in the U.S., Europe and Canada have long acknowledged the imbalance and have agreed that the rich world needs to make deep cuts to emissions by 2050 in order to allow for an overall reduction in global levels even as developing countries increase their consumption of fossil fuels such as coal and oil.
The historical argument is being overshadowed by the realization that China has become the world's largest emitter this year and will continue to outpace the United States as it industrializes its economy. However, China's income per person and its emissions per capita remain far below the levels of the United States or Canada.
The accusers
Bolivian President Evo Morales has been leading the case for the prosecution, calling not only for reparations but also a “people's tribunal” to impose monetary and criminal sanctions on offending rich-world governments and corporations.
Last April, Mr. Morales played host to the People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, which issued a manifesto calling on rich countries to finance the “decolonization of the atmosphere.” The Cochabamba Accord was endorsed by activist groups throughout the developed world.
“There is both a legal and a moral obligation to deal with climate debt,” says Janet Redman, a co-director of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, who helped to draft the document. Among the speakers at Cochabamba was Canadian activist Naomi Klein, a vocal advocate of the need for reparations.
While most developing world leaders steer clear of Mr. Morales's broad denunciation of capitalism, they share his view that the climate debt of the developed world is a fundamental issue at the Cancun talks and cannot be addressed by shuffling aid budgets and offering loans.
The Group of 77, which represents an alliance of poorer countries, has called for annual financial transfers of up to 1.5 per cent of rich countries' gross domestic product by 2020. Applying that figure to Canada in 2010 would require new aid spending of $18-billion, while the American government would have to come up with $210-billion (U.S.).
