Associate professor John Barnett from the University of Melbourne talks about international negoitations on climate change mitigation.

Beyond Zero's Scott Bilby and Pablo Brait speak to John Barnett, associate professor at the University of Melbourne's school of land and environment, about Intergovernmental treaties and negotiation on climate change mitigation.

Beyond Zero speaks to John Barnett

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Scott Bilby:      My name is Scott Bilby and with me in the studio is Pablo Brait, hello Pablo, how are you going?

Pablo Brait:      Hello, I'm very well.

Scott Bilby:      Today, Pablo, we're going to be speaking with John Barnett, he's an Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne School of Land and Environment, he's an Australian Research Council Fellow, amongst other things, we'll speak to him more about that, but we want to speak to him today about inter-governmental treaties addressing climate change. Hello John, how are you going?

John Barnett:      Good thanks. How are you?

Scott Bilby:      I'm very good, thank you. The question that we usually start off with most of our guests is how did you get interested in climate change, so how did that first begin for you?

John Barnett:      I'm a researcher, so I finished my PHD in 1999, and I was looking at theories about what's called Environmental Security and it was a fairly theoretical piece of research. I moved to New Zealand and got a grant from the New Zealand government to look at the way climate change poses risks to security in small island states in the Pacific and became then quite interested in the different levels of political action and the different levels of institutions, from the global level right down to the village level, and how they create or solve the problems of climate change for the people in the Pacific which meant that I started to work at various different levels of institutions dealing with climate change.

Scott Bilby:      I'll get you to quickly tell us a bit about the role that you currently have at the University of Melbourne.

John Barnett:      I just finished a five year fellowship where I was looking again at those issues, mostly in the Pacific Islands; I'm moving back into a teaching position so I do teaching on issues to do with the relationship between poverty and environment and issues to do with environmental change and the way that affects people. So I'm a social scientist, interested in particularly the political economy of environmental problems.

Scott Bilby:      We want to talk to you about the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the UNFCCC, and your role as a negotiator for one of the Pacific island countries, a little while back; a lot of people are aware of the UNFCCC and know that it's an intergovernmental treaty, meetings where governments try to come to terms with what needs to be done to tackle climate change, can you kind of explain that a bit better than I have and how that kind of works?

John Barnett:      I guess it is appropriate to call it a treaty; people would normally call it a regime which is a way of saying that there's a process where states need to come to some sort of agreement and set some rules about how to act on the problem. The UNFCCC was originally signed in 1992 at the Earth Summit and came into force a couple of years later of first party. There's two meetings per year, of the UNFCCC, the meeting of the bodies, one is the meeting of it's two subsidiary bodies in Bonn, and the main one that we get in December each year is the Conference of Parties. The first Conference of Parties met in 1995, with a slight asterisk on that, if I get my facts wrong there, and then the Kyoto protocol was negotiated in 1997 and it is a legally binding agreement that imposes emissions reduction targets on a subset of those countries.

Scott Bilby:      So we have these meetings, and I guess it's quite confusing for not just myself but the public in general because they seem to be these big inter-governmental meetings that always seem to be in some far-off place and they seem to be having lots of meetings. When you look at the UNFCCC website the schedule of meetings is quite overwhelming, where do you start reading about this sort of stuff, so it's a difficult thing to get across to the public that this is maybe actually doing some good or something like that?

John Barnett:      There's a few different elements to that one. I think that the fact that it is such a busy thing, even the Conference of Parties, that gets all the media attention, a smaller one would have ten thousand people in it, a big one like Copenhagen had something like forty, and within one of those meetings there's multiple processes running in parallel all over the time, informal negotiation groups and contact groups and so on, it's just a very large amount of work, and this has implications for having power in that system, you have to have a very large delegation if you're a country, and you have to have in that delegation a very large number of very skilled people. The Australian delegation is quite large and it takes a number of experienced diplomats and lawyers and probably can't cover every event going on at a UNFCCC COP. If you're the country that I represented, where two people go, you're just lost in a sea of busyness. Then throughout the calendar of the year there's the COP, the biggest event, but the subsidiary bodies meeting in Bonn is also a very big event, and then there's a series of smaller events going on all of the time working on different aspects of the convention. So it's a very very busy space. And that's important. Is it doing any good is a very difficult question to answer.

Scott Bilby:      You were at the Bali conference, when was the Bali conference?

John Barnett:      That was in 2007

Scott Bilby:      Tell us what you were doing there and how it's coloured your view...

John Barnett:      I was a negotiator for a small island state called Niue which is one of the Pacific Island countries. Because the Pacific Island countries are small they tend to pool their efforts and work as a group with the other small island countries from the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean, there's 44 of them and they're called the Alliance of Small Island States. They tend to work as a block. So what you do as an individual is somewhat determined by what the block of countries decides is the work they want done over the course of those two weeks. In the case of what we did, it was less that the government of Niue went there with any particular strong idea of what they wanted to get out of the Conference of Parties and more that they wanted to contribute to the work of the UNFCCC, of the Alliance of Small Island States, so I was assigned a job, basically. That job was not a particularly big one because you have to have a lot of experience and skill in the negotiation process so the very important things they tend to give to the seasoned people. It was simply at that time that the Intergovernmental Panel of climate change had released its fourth assessment report and it's very unclear what the UNFCCC conference does with that report and  how it is to understand it. What the UNFCCC does, and this is a really tiny part of what happened in Bali, I want to stress that, is issue some sort of statement about how it receives and understands the IPCC report. And that was about ten days of negotiation to produce a page.

Scott Bilby:      Wow.

John Barnett:      That's not binding in any sense.

Scott Bilby:      That's probably what the average person's perception of those sort of big government and inter-governmental meetings are like anyway, which it's a bit kind of depressing to have you confirm that to some degree. Now the Kyoto Protocol is very famous, and it has some legally binding agreements, wasn't that included in the UN Convention on Climate Change treaty at some stage, so couldn't that help us kind of actually get somewhere?

John Barnett:      The Kyoto Protocol was probably a good start. It's a protocol to the Framework Convention on Climate Change, whereas the Framework Convention on Climate Change countries made commitments and they all have obligations and make commitments; they're not legally binding in any sense. The Kyoto protocol imposed - or countries agreed to emissions reductions targets, some countries, we did ultimately agree to this, that was legally binding in the sense that there will be potential ramifications in not meeting your target. On the other hand, the Kyoto protocol didn't specify what the ramifications are. It's quite possible that if the target hadn't been met it wasn't clear what that means. It really comes up against the problem of power in the world system; what's the world going to do if nobody meets their target, interesting question. The target was collective amongst all those countries for a five percent emissions reduction below their 1990 levels and they met that only because of the collapse of the economy in the Soviet Union which generated a lot of reduction in emissions; they were shared amongst all parties in order to allow them to meet their cap. But it's notable that the developed industrial countries who had individal targets within that, almost none of them met their targets, with the exception of Sweden and the UK.

Scott Bilby:      I think we should go back to that issue of power soon, but I just want to know if you can tell us a bit about what it's actually like in the negotiations, what actually happens over the two weeks, or ten days, or one week period that you're sitting there, talking to the people from the other countries, trying to get that one page written.

John Barnett:     We went in there from a Small Island States point of view wanting to produce a text, and this would go back and be approved by the plenary by all parties, if you can get text that says things that you want established as a precedent then that's advantageous; later you can refer to that text. From the Small Island States point of view, we wanted to highlight the issues about 450 parts per million CO2 equivalent being potentially dangerous climate change and really highlight that point; two degrees is dangerous. Various other aspects of highlighting that the IPCC report showed that small island states are vulnerable and that there's critical thresholds; that the burning embers diagram in the IPCC report showing critical thresholds were something that we also wanted highlighting. From the Small Island States group, we went in and said we want this document to say we welcome the report from the IPCC, we note the following things and we urge the parties to act on them. From the point of view of countries like Saudi Arabia, they didn't even want a text; they don't want to know that the IPCC report exists because it's all potentially implies that there should be reductions in emissions and they say that will hurt the price of oil - although there is no evidence for that whatsoever. What happens is you go into a writing group, the secretariat of the UNFCCC will produce an initial draft text, the you negotiate on that text for ten days. We got two days on the first line preambular text saying that we welcome the report from the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, a number of other countries said we don’t welcome it. we just note it, and other countries said we don't want the text at all. So we had two days on whether we had no text or used the word welcome or the word note.

Scott Bilby:      I'm starting to form the opinion that these inter-governmental panels are more like trying to garner change by dripping water on a stone over a very long period of time. It's a very slow erosive sort of process; are we getting anywhere, or are we just standing still?

John Barnett:      I think it's difficult. I have a perspective come from having worked in only two and there are people who have been doing on this for fifteen or twenty years who in many ways are more optimistic than me and I think sometimes, if you want to use the metaphor of erosion, sometimes you do hit sandstone and you get a big wave and you can wash away a lot of things, other times it's slow progress. It is difficult in that there are no rules about decision making so everything ultimately has to be done by consensus, which means that any party that wants to say no has a veto power and can slow things down for a very long time. There's no agreement about what the ultimate objective of the convention is. It says to avoid dangerous climate change, but that isn't linked to any idea of what an environmental outcome that would be unacceptable is and that isn't linked to any idea about temperature rise or greenhouse gas targets. You really can't sit there and say, listen, we're negotiating here about the effectiveness of this particular piece of technology, we could do the modelling if we knew that dangerous climate change is 450ppm CO2 and the melting of glaciers, we could understand how that technology fits into the objective of the convention. But there is no objective of the convention really.

Scott Bilby:      Now there's quite a bit of publicity, I remember at Copenhagen in 2009 Council of the Parties Fifteen I think it was, there was a lot of publicity around the Pacific Island nations and their plight as low lying nations and their plea for adequate climate change response. Given your role at Bali, were you pleased by the publicity that they got, or did you feel that it's nice people hearing their story but it actually doesn't mean anything?

John Barnett:      I think that the role that the Small Island States have always played is to set a moral standard. In the lead up to Copenhagen, they put together some fairly serious proposals that propose targets and they were taken seriously. So you put something on the table and countries have to consider it. One way of understanding the problem of climate change is understanding who the losers are going to be and certainly the Small Island States of the Pacific are living in very ecologically sensitive environments and they are going to wear the effects of climate change quicker than others. They need to have a voice in this process. If they didn't have voice in this process then we might be talking about accepting the level of global warming to be four degrees. Tuvali tells you that it is not acceptable to have global warming of four degrees, it's one and a half degrees, and that should be the standard. So it's very important that they have that voice and play that role and they continue to do that very well.

Scott Bilby:      They've done a great job. Pablo?

Pablo Brait:      Do you see these negotiations ending up at a point where we have a treaty that will actually avoid runaway climate change, or reach the limit it to 1.5 degrees of warming?

John Barnett:      We're not going to get 1.5 degrees, I think that's probably impossible. I think we should be trying, I think it's not impossible, but if you look at the trend of projections, if you take a graph of the worst emissions reduction scenario produced by the IPCC in the late 1990s and take the top line and say this would be the worst case outcome of emissions, despite the Kyoto Protocol, we've emitted above that trend. In other words, we're emitting emissions globally more than we thought we could possibly do so in a worst case scenario in the late 1990s. The kinds of changes that are required to stabilise it even at 550 parts per million, which would be three degrees of warming, are not impossible, but we're talking about a massive transformation of the way we organise ourselves.

Scott Bilby:      We've got to hope that we actually, that theoretically you can actually stabilise at those concentrations, because you might reach a point where it's runaway climate change, you've set off too many tipping points, from what I've heard that seems to be pretty much correct.

John Barnett:      What that burning embers diagram shows and what most people show is once you pass two degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels then you start getting the risk of significant non-linearities and feedbacks in the climate system, the higher you go the more likely that is. This is a bigger systems science thing, we're talking about ocean currents and monsoon patterns and glaciers and those kind of things, but at a very local level, two degrees of warming anywhere in the Tropics is annual coral bleaching. At a global level, we might not care about that, but if you live on an island where coral is what makes your island, you care a lot. There are different ideas about what's dangerous and different thresholds about what's acceptable. If we take the standard of the person who is most at risk of climate change in the world then we need to be thinking about stabilising at one or one and a half degrees above pre-industrial levels. Which means reducing from current emission levels, we have to take carbon out of the atmosphere at that point.

Pablo Brait:      I guess my question is then so the UNFCCC, does it cater for those people who are facing the impacts of climate change first and worst, or is it failing those people?

John Barnett:      It's failing those people. The people who represent those people would say it's failing those people, but we don't want to abandon this because anything else would be worse. There's a real problem now about the negotiation of targets moving into the Group of Twenty, outside of the UNFCCC process where the 20 rich countries decide what they're going to do on climate change, then those countries who need to have their voice won't be in the room. So they may agree on something that is economically and politically acceptable to them, but that would be extremely dangerous for the majority of the world's population. From a Small Island States point of view, we would say the UNFCCC is flawed and isn't delivering what is needed and there's all sorts of procedural problems and problems of power; it's better than any sort of alternative.

Scott Bilby:      The emissions trajectory globally is running way above even the IPCC's worst projections and a poor climate change outcome is looking more and more likely, we really have to turn that around with every effort we can, that is going to impact on humans with regards to things that you know a lot about such as security, hunger, conflicts and access to water, so I assume you look around and see some poor nations out there with some very salient institutional weaknesses that obviously cause you some concern, what is it about these nations that is really going to hit them very hard?

John Barnett:      It differs from place to place and my work is mostly in our region. To me, in terms of the Pacific Islands, the critical environmental change initially will be concerning water. That's kind of good news in the sense that water is a relatively easy problem to solve, so in terms of adaptation you can sort of solve the water problem and that probably will take out some of the immediate risk. I think disasters in the Pacific Islands, cyclones and flooding events and drought are going to be increasingly intense and that will have significant impacts on social and ecological systems and the problem will be that they will become more intense and the return time will shorten, so when you get a flood that goes through a catchment in Fiji it takes three years to recover, then you're ready for the next one. If the next one comes in two years, you're never ready to recover, so you get this critical process of decline and non-recovery. To me, if you were to look for the most serious climate related problem that we're going to look at in the next five years in our region, I would say there's a fairly high risk of famine in East Timor basically. There's people there already eating one meal a day and they have frequent problems of drought and if those problems become more intense in the absence of any other change, there's going to be significant mortality there.

Scott Bilby:      We've already heard noises about people saying we're going to have to leave our island state, so mass migration, people being forced to leave is very much on the cards.

John Barnett:      I think we should be less worried, the Pacific Islands are not Africa, you do get a lot of mobility across borders in Africa because people can walk, you can't walk from a Pacific Island. There's a significant barrier to movement and that barrier is an ocean and to overcome that barrier costs money, then the points of entry out of those countries is through a registered port of arrival. So there's all sorts of problems of immigration. So what that means is that the people from the Pacific who are able to leave are not the ones you want to be worried about

Scott Bilby:       And that's what's so awful because -

John Barnett:      It's the 98 percent who can't who are stuck behind who are the problem.

Scott Bilby:      There will probably have to be some sort of genuine relocation effort, Australia is probably going to have to take some people and New Zealand; really, surely we have a responsibility there

John Barnett:      It's a difficult issue, the research we've done shows that people don't want to leave and they'll say "I'd rather die, this is the land that God gave me, this is my culture, this is my custom and I'm not going to abandon the environmental basis of my culture and custom for anything". Take a look at the history of disposition and relocation of indigenous people in this country and ask whether that was a good thing and whether we should have avoided that. That is what we ought to be thinking in the Pacific. The day may come when we need to begin thinking about resettlement, but that day is not now. We should be thinking about adaptation to enable people to continue to enjoy living, and that's their human right.

Scott Bilby:      Of course. That brings me to another thing that really kind of gets my goat, maybe I'm just a yuppie white boy, it's easy for me to be more concerned about climate change mitigation than about adaptation but I really do sense a bit of, I can't think of another word, a bit of dishonesty from a lot of business and government when they talk about climate change adaptation all the time as if it's like, well, we're just going to let things go, business as usual, and we'll worry about adaptating into it, and that is not actually solve the problem.

John Barnett:      That's probably true, I think there's an assumption that you can substitute some degree of mitigation for adaptation and that's wrong. We are now committed to climate change, adaptation is required. At two degrees of warming, even in this country, we're losing things. We're losing things that are important to us, like the Barrier Reef, like many many species and wetlands in the alpine areas. There's going to be big distributional effects, it'll increase inequality in this country. We can't really adapt to a lot of climate change in this country and it's wrong to think that we can and we can accept a high level of emissions and adapt our way out of it; we can't.

Pablo Brait:      So, a twofold question, it's about what people can do from here; the first one is there seems to be a growing coalition of countries who are going to face the impacts of climate change really bad, so you've got the Association of Small Island States, you've got a more vocal group of Latin American countries like Nicaragua, Equador and Bolivia forming together; the first question is what can they do to make this UNFCCC process work better, the second question is, as Australians, what can we do to help the plight of the Pacific Islands and try to prevent these catastrophes that you've talked about today?

John Barnett:      If we wait for a global agreement of 180 parties that doesn't have a clear objective, that doesn't have rules or procedures to solve problems for us we're dead. We have to internalise this problem in our everyday lives and in the way we work, the decisions we make about how we move and what we buy, how we live, how we vote and how we organise ourselves socially because if we don't do it nobody is going to do it for us. That's clear, we have a responsibility. This principle of common and differentiated responsibilities that we expect of the rich countries, actually we should expect of ourselves. If we don't do that, we're going to pay the price ultimately, but a lot of other people are going to pay the price before us. I do believe that, through the way we act and the way we organise ourselves we can initiate the sort of transition, we can drive that transition without hoping that a government will drive it upon us, we probably don't want a government to drive that process for us actually.

Secondly, in terms of the UNFCCC process, I do think one of the only positive things to come out of Copenhagen was that the group of 77 and China, which was about 130 developed countries, used to act as a block, they were very monolithic and very slow and they had very unhelpful positions that were generally driven by the most reluctant party which was often Saudi Arabia. What's happened in Copenhagen is that the BRIC countries, Brazil, India and China have broken out of that block. The least developed countries will act more increasingly independently out of that block, the AOSIS(Alliance of Small Island States) group will act more independently, we're going to see a more mobile and a less constructive and unhelpful set of responses in the forum. The LDC (Least Developed Countries) group, the AOSIS group and the Latin American countries could probably speak with one voice and they would have a lot of very similar interests so we might see that they have a lot more power in the convention. Whether that's going to change it is another question. Getting Saudi Arabia out of the way, and China and India dominating that group of developing countries is a good move.

Scott Bilby:      Well, John, we've just run out of time, thank you very much for joining us today and filling us in on all these intergovernmental treaties and panels and your role as a Pacific Island negotiator.

John Barnett:      Pleasure, thanks.

Scott Bilby:      We've just been speaking to John Barnett, Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne of Land and Environment and an Australian Research Council Fellow. If you want to know more about Beyond Zero Emissions, about this podcast, other podcasts, our Zero Carbon plans, our discussion groups, or if you want to make a donation, visit <a href=http://www.beyondzeroemissions.org>BeyondZeroEmissions.org</a>, thank you for listening.