– President Jagdeo tells COP15 meeting in Copenhagen
GUYANESE Head of State President Bharrat Jagdeo yesterday delivered an address to his fellow world leaders at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of Parties (COP) 15 meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark where he stated that the people of the world need more than political rhetoric and defensive posturing.

“They deserve our hard-working, problem-solving, reality-grounded resolve to face down the threat of catastrophic climate change,” he said.

He urged his fellow leaders to move beyond bickering over procedural failings and logistical mistakes and focus on identifying and solving the strategic issues that will give hope to the world.

“If we as leaders think that we should work through hundreds of brackets in a legal text, we will fail. Our job is to cut through invented complexity, and to instruct our negotiators to quickly translate our decisions into operational language that can then be codified into a legal agreement,” the President urged.

He went on to outline the four major issues that leaders could still resolve during the remaining hours of the UNFCCC meeting to secure a positive outcome and generate momentum.

These, he said, are reconciling the differences on the temperature target that is needed to stabilise the atmosphere, the need to ensure that the developed world agrees to ambitious, binding cuts in emissions, the need to see commitments to financial transfers to the developing world that match the scale of what needs to be done, and the form of the long-term agreement and the monitoring, reporting and verifying of the commitments that countries make.

While acknowledging that he supports the Association of Small Island States’ call for a 1.5°C target, President Jagdeo stated that “whether we target 1.5°C or 2°C is irrelevant if disagreeing about the target makes the achievement of both impossible”.

He urged the world’s leaders to maximize ambition that is continually guided by science.

On the issue of cuts in emissions from developed countries, the Head of State stressed the need for the meeting to result in clear commitments that cannot be reversed.

“Focusing on targets is meaningless unless we are mobilising the action needed to achieve them. If the commitments made here are still not enough to reach the stabilisation targets we set, we need to finalise the commitments in a legally binding agreement within six months,” he stated.

The President lauded the progressive commitments from the European Union, Japan and others to both a Fast Start Fund for the next three years and a 2020 target for significantly scaled-up funding for developing countries to combat climate change, but stated that others have not yet fully internalised what is needed to solve the climate problem.

“We also need to leave with a firm commitment to funding up until 2020. At an absolute minimum, that funding must be US$100 billion per year. Not only to finance the adaptation needs of the developing world, but also because if we are to defeat climate change, we need to unleash the biggest wave of innovation the world has ever seen to stimulate energy efficiency, catalyze a global move to clean energy, and to redesign the agricultural and forestry economies in the developing world,” he highlighted.

Finally, President Jagdeo stated that the long-term climate change agreement should be designed in such a way as to ensure the continuation of the Kyoto Protocol’s provisions for countries that have ratified Kyoto, whereas other Annex I countries are required to commit to targets in which the rest of the world can have confidence, and where the large developing countries can demonstrate how their contributions are real, and in accordance with the principles of common but differentiated responsibility.

“We are presented with one of the most profound choices in history. We hold in our hands the wellbeing of billions. And when future generations look back on these days, they will not focus on brackets and the administrative failings of those who ran this process. They will look at the world around them. They will look at the quality of their own lives and the lives of their children. They will know whether the universal values that underpin peace, justice and human development gained ground because of the decisions we make. And they will judge whether their world is one of opportunity and hope, or one of increasing conflict and climate disaster. That world, their world, is not pre-destined. It is being created by us at this time in this city. Whether or not we let them down is entirely up to us,” he concluded.