Conscience must triumph over theatrics in Nagoya
COP10: Cop out or Co-evolve?
Feature article by Eric Johnston
Kyoto Journal's special Biodiversity Issue
October 2010
Delegates, when you arrive in Nagoya, Japan this October for the UN’s 10th conference on biodiversity, you’ll be meeting at a decisive moment. For the agreements you reach, or fail to, at COP10* may well determine whether many forms of life survive or die out — including the large-brained, spiritually-inclined but as yet self-defeating, toolmaking ape, a relative newcomer to this biodiverse world.
Moreover, given the bitter failure of last December’s climate change conference in Copenhagen, what you achieve in Nagoya will affect not only biodiversity but also global warming. COP10 in Japan is the last major UN conference before the world gathers in Mexico in late November for yet another round of climate change talks. Delegates and NGOs heading to Cancun will be nervously watching the outcome of your negotiations, and your success or failure will directly impact their chances for reaching a climate change agreement that makes a genuine difference.
But in and of itself, COP10 is extremely important. One of the most idealistic yet crucial goals is to secure a treaty committing your nations to binding targets for preserving biodiversity over the coming decade. Make no mistake: Nagoya is not merely an excuse for another UN gabfest. As UN negotiators, you know that UN meetings are like sausage-making — slow, messy, involving all manner of ingredients, and observed with a feeling of queasiness. That said, unless the UN process, including its limitations, is understood by conference veterans and rookies alike, COP10 will be fated to fail before the microphones are even switched on. This need not happen.
To participants and lay readers alike: Whether you’re sitting in the main hall, back in the pressroom, manning an NGO booth, or following the conference from far away with ever-increasing concern, you have a role to play. Here, then, for readers at all levels of involvement, is a basic guide to what takes place at UN conferences — your program notes, as it were, for COP10. Based on years of personal experience and spiced with anecdotal chagrin, what follows may shed some light on how we can progress from mere good intentions to a binding United Nations treaty.
Step One: The Script
Every UN conference begins with a draft text of the proposed treaty, the codex upon which official discussions proceed. The text that arrives in Nagoya will already have been edited countless times. And the working draft for COP10 will make for heavy reading: drafts of UN treaties can run to more than 200 pages, and their dense jargon, Delphic phrasing and alphabet soup of acronyms makes deciphering the exact meaning of many of their phrases, let alone sentences or paragraphs, a daunting task.
During negotiations, each line of text is debated, criticized, parsed for hidden meaning, and analyzed for implications regarding matters of international and domestic concern, whether political, social, economic, scientific, ethnic, gender-related, or religious. Provided all goes smoothly, delegates will agree to the final wording. But imagine a room teeming with politicians, lawyers, academics, editors and interpreters, each cluster representing one of up to 193 UN member countries, aided in turn by UN staff, all trying to reach agreement. Now picture each of these individuals having to check with their bosses back home to see if the proposed compromise wording, or even a newly inserted adjective, meets with approval. By comparison, The Council of Nicaea was a church picnic.
To further spice up the sausage, any nation’s delegation may offer its own alternate wording during the conference, even if such words were not in the copies of the draft that low-paid UN staffers labored through the night to copy and distribute to every delegate by the following morning’s session. Before any new language is formally debated, though, “informal’’ meetings will customarily be held on the sidelines, where suggested changes can be discussed in relative privacy. For instance, a delegate from Fredonia seeking controversial text alterations would first sit down informally with the conference’s top UN official, the conference president (usually a senior political figure from the host country, elected at the start by the delegates to serve in that capacity for the meeting’s duration). This conversation would also include delegates from the most influential nations (the U.S., China, India, and a few European countries) as well as regional blocs like the Group of 77 Nations or the European Union. Sometimes representatives from Africa, the Caribbean nations, or the world’s small-island states are also present. All sides cajole, plea-bargain, and test the waters for any possible changes in the hope of avoiding a drawn-out floor fight that could chew up precious conference time and create unwanted rancor. Strong support from other key delegates for Fredonia’s proposal increases the likelihood that it will not only be formally introduced but also formally adopted. Time needed for these “impromptu,’’ unofficial gatherings all through the conference is one major reason why events like COP10 tend to be marathon sessions of ten days to two weeks.
At this point, though, delegates are still working with the official text that does not yet contain Fredonia’s proposal. The manuscript may well contain sentences like the one below, which was part of the working draft at December’s climate change conference in Copenhagen:
Parties to the Convention agree that by 2020 developed nations [shall reduce] [make efforts to reduce] their greenhouse gas emissions by [X] [at least 25 percent] based on [1990 levels] [other base year].
Like a climate change agreement, forging a biodiversity agreement in Nagoya will eventually come down to discussion over two sets of numbers: scientific and financial. Because these are the most controversial parts of any UN negotiation, it’s usually a good bet that many of the bracketed phrases and X’s in the COP10 codex at the start of the conference will still be there near the end. That’s when the top bosses (presidents and prime ministers in Copenhagen, senior ministers at Nagoya’s COP10) dramatically fly in, either to fill-in the blanks and save the day, or to let the treaty crash and burn because no agreement over the final numbers was ever reached.
And make no mistake, a UN conference like COP10 really is about numbers, even if it’s decided at the end to sign a treaty without any. Every delegate agrees that protection of biodiversity is a grand idea and that action needs to be taken. But how many hectares of hardwood forest do we save from the chainsaws? How many square miles of ocean do we declare off limits to ships hunting beluga whales or Atlantic bluefin tuna? What percentage of rainforests in Brazil and Indonesia, or wetlands in Hokkaido, should be set aside, and how much of their biologically diverse plant life that forms the basis for medicines researched, developed and sold by Big Pharma should be the property of the indigenous peoples who have lived in those forests for centuries? Finally, how much will all of this cost, and who will write the checks?
Domestic politics of the moment also comes into play. When international scientific recommendations and local political needs are in sync, a country’s delegate will be a fervent believer in the sanctity of the scientific method. But when the numbers (scientific and fiscal) are at odds with the politics, that same delegate will shout out every excuse, rationale, or half-truth possible to discredit the science and obstruct agreement. He or she will vilify the UN’s mild-mannered cardinals of science, recasting them as evil inquisitors seeking to persecute the innocent.
At times, the tactics used are designed to distract one and all from the inconvenient truths that the science proves. Expect to hear dubious claims about ancient historical or cultural norms. Be on the alert for covert or even overt suggestions that the scientific conclusions are those of racists and imperialists. And anticipate appeals to the delegates to be politically “realistic’’ — a line of attack that consoles as it counsels: “A deeply flawed treaty is better than none.”
When the science is too irrefutable, the recommendations too widely accepted, when the other delegates and even the media are deaf to the bellowing of the naysayers, strategies will shift to the icily methodological. Watch for well-funded efforts to discredit the science through deft diversions, like pointing to isolated facts that seemingly cast doubt on the overall conclusion, or tactics such as ignoring statistical principles and common sense by insisting that, while the vast majority of scientists might be in agreement, a few mavericks are not. Would-be thwarters of the process will thus argue that many more years of research (preferably funded by the American Enterprise Institute) and more “public debate’’ (preferably led by members of the Fortune 500) are prerequisites (i.e., stumbling blocks) to the signing of any agreements.
As the final stage of negotiations dawns, some combination of these devices is often employed by all sides. At COP10, the numbers debate is unlikely to be as intense as in Copenhagen. This is because, at present, no single international body of biodiversity experts makes recommendations to the UN, whereas the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) does for global warming (although there is broad agreement to create one during COP10. See below). At Copenhagen, numbers like 1.5 (the maximum temperature rise in degrees Celsius that island nations can tolerate over the next century without being swallowed by rising oceans), 25 percent (the minimum amount developed nations were supposed to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 to stave off irreversible global warming), and 1990 (the year whose levels the reduction should be based upon) were the subject of heated contention; for two weeks, 130 world leaders, 190 UN delegates, 200,000 NGO representatives — and 21 million supporters of a climate change treaty who rallied worldwide halfway through the conference — debated, demonstrated and, occasionally, physically clashed over what the final treaty should look like.
“By the year 2020, a 25 percent decrease from 1990 levels.” These numbers originated with the IPCC back in 2007. They not only earned that organization, along with Al Gore, a Nobel Peace Prize, but also made the IPCC enemy number one among the cynical and the corrupt, and those fearful of social change or ignorant of basic science, whether by circumstance or by choice. As mentioned above, biodiversity still lacks a single, cohesive assemblage of experts with the international influence of the IPCC. The good news is that, prior to COP10, the UN General Assembly was expected to approve the creation of the “Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).’’ The group’s mission will be to “carry out peer reviews of scientific literature in order to provide governments with ‘gold standard’ reports’’, according to the BBC. The bad news is that it will be a few more years until the new body can provide UN delegates with coordinated policy advice. That begs the question: without a consensus group of scientific experts helping to guide
COP10’s script development, will negotiators ad-lib, or simply read off cue cards provided by their country’s industrial groups and political lobbyists?
Step TWO: Casting Call & Rehearsals
No Hollywood production rivals a UN conference for the sheer number and variety of stars, character actors and extras. We’ll meet the Greek chorus in the pressroom momentarily. But first, the NGOs. The stagecraft of these non-governmental organizations ranges from the street-theater antics of college-age kids parading around the convention center in costumes, waving signs and chanting slogans, to otaku-obsessive/ compulsive types holding briefings that anybody with a pair of PhDs and years of field experience could easily follow, to the glitzy, Las Vegas-like showmanship of “astroturf’’ organizations posing as grassroots NGOs while shilling for Big Oil or Big Pharma.
But these players will always be upstaged by the major international NGOs, who wield great power behind the scenes. Media-savvy and diplomatically astute, these NGOs tote PowerPoint presentations and microphones that always work flawlessly. At any UN conference, growing numbers of delegations from Africa and Asia rely heavily on the bigger NGOs, not only for advice but also for grunt work, and some NGOs even serve as de facto diplomatic staff for countries unable to afford the dozens of gophers and underlings that delegations from the big shot nations can call upon. Still other NGOs serve as unauthorized translation agencies for the bureaucrats and media of whichever countries they represent. Crucially, these NGOs inform a client country’s delegates and media about what was really being said earlier in the day, when these attendees were “listening intently” to those who may as well have been speaking in tongues, and feigning understanding of the highly nuanced language and technical jargon which was roughly (often very roughly) being translated into one of the six official UN languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish), none of which happens to be their native language. Then there are the “cast extras’’ whose precise purpose is not always clear...
To read the full article, go to the Kyoto Journal website here.
Eric Johnston is Deputy Editor for The Japan Times Osaka office and veteran of UN conferences in Japan and abroad, including the 1997 Kyoto Protocol conference and the 2009 Copenhagen conference. He will cover the COP10 conference for The Japan Times.
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