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February 13, 2006

“Bend it Like Beijing,” says Professor Najam at Montreal Climate Talks

Fletcher Professor Adil Najam was one of two keynote speakers at a high-level pre-conference event entitled “Development First or Climate First?” held during the climate negotiations in Montreal. Professor Najam was deeply involved in the run-up to these negotiations - he advised the Group of 77 (an organization of developing countries) on various aspects of climate negotiations and guided the agenda setting process on behalf of the conference hosts. Several other Fletcher School students also attended the talks.

According to Professor Najam, “The talks were particularly vital because they brought the Kyoto Protocol into force and also because they began negotiating the terms under which more countries, including developing countries, might become more involved. The Montreal talks are considered to be critical for the future of the global climate and for the global climate regime.”

The opportunity to present a keynote address to 41 Government Environment Ministers prior to the main talks was particularly fruitful, he said. In his address, Professor Najam emphasized the importance of moving the process forward by reaching a general consensus for developing countries. His keynote address also gave him valuable face-time to network with the government representatives.

“They really sent high caliber government ministers to the pre-conference and the opportunity to speak to this collective group on what colleagues and I think should happen during and more importantly after the talks,” He explained.

With the talks now completed, Professor Najam stresses the need to think about what happens next. “We need to give some serious though about what comes next. What happens after Kyoto? The plan cannot just be an extension of the present regime but we can’t go back to a simpler framework either. We need a different global compact between developing and industrialized countries.”

Professor Najam considers the need for such a compact as a question of morals. Industrialized countries must keep their promises (most haven’t so far). “We need a new deal on sustainable development,” says Professor Najam, “not only on emissions but also a deal to find a way for industrialized countries to keep their promises, which so far they have not.”

In this sense, Professor Najam argues that the US has been more honest than most since at least they’re doing what they said they’d be doing: relatively nothing. Professor Najam maintains that the industrialized countries have really let the talks down. “The West has really got to start putting their money where their mouth is—not just their foot.”

Professor Najam argues that industrialized countries need to start “bending the curve,” that is, putting a dent into their emissions levels as their economies continue to grow. “There does not have to be a negative trade-off between economic growth and bending the curve. All sorts of technological improvements make this perfectly feasible. In fact, China has achieved a “minor miracle” with emissions per unit growth decreasing as economic growth continues to soar. “And they did this without really trying,” explains Professor Najam, “their power plants were ageing and therefore replaced with cleaner more efficient plants in the 1990s. That’s how they locked themselves in with cleaner technology.”

Can the other international players in the spot light “bend it like Beijing” and score a few goals for Gaia?

It is no secret that developing countries have to invest in a different development trajectory. The most likely way to push this forward is with the active support of industrialized through clean technology transfer. This would enable developing countries to learn how to score lower emissions as their economies continue to grow. In return, industrial countries acquire more “space” to deal with and manage their own emissions. In Professor Najam’s view, “this is a win-win strategy.”

Fletcher MALD student Lauren Inouye attended the talk in two capacities. Wearing her Fletcher hat, Lauren gathered valuable information for a paper on how to engage the US in international climate negotiations. To this end, she joined other Fletcher students at several briefings organized by Dave Runnals, a visiting professor at Yale and a founder of the International Institute for Sustainable Development. “I also attended three to four ‘side-events’ daily, looking at successful voluntary reduction initiatives, ‘lessons-learned’ from past CDM and emissions-trading programs, ‘backcasting’ models looking at how we might be able to achieve low-carbon futures, tweaking the structure of the GEF, etc. I was also there in my capacity as the ‘steering wheel’ or chairperson of SustainUs, a network of students and young professionals in Sustainable Development.”

Mark Proden, a graduate student in Fletcher’s Global Masters of Arts Program (GMAP) was also in Montreal. “My attendance was made possible through Professor Najam's connections on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the NGO International Institute for Environment and Development,” Mark Proden who is writing his thesis on Climate Change in an effort to incorporate his previous Masters Degree, Environmental Studies, and his current work at Fletcher in International Relations. Mark’s thesis will be in the form of a policy paper, mainly targeting the Bush Administrations, since the tide of support for climate change efforts seems to have shifted in Congress in the last year with a number of pro-climate change legislative acts and resolutions--Climate Stewardship Act of 2005, Bider-Lugar Initiative, Clean Power Act and many others.

While in Montreal, Mark held long conversations with every type of delegation present—NGOs, LDCs, developing nations, small island nations, the US delegation, the EU and multitude of other groups to understand their interests and positions

Can the US and developing countries “bend it like Beijing?” If this is half time in the negotiations on climate change, the score arguably stands at 1 to 0 in favor of Beijing, which is where Professors Najam and Moomaw are heading to on February 12th to present their findings at the next meeting of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Can coaches Najam and Moomaw motivate the international players to score more goals and keep global emissions below the carbon dioxide crossbar?

By Patrick Meier, PhD Canidate, with Lauren Inouye, MALD '06, and Mark Proden, GMAP '06

Posted by fletcher at February 13, 2006 11:42 AM