Cancun Agreement is ecocide, says UN Ambassador, threatening court action

Amidst the optimism displayed after the agreement at the 16th Conference of Parties (COP16) IN Cancun, there was a lone dissenting voice. Pablo Solon, UN Ambassador for Bolivia, officially opposed the agreement, later threatening court action.

"Sooner or later we will realise the earth has rights, rights to regenerate its capacity. Mankind has to understand human beings cannot exist without Mother Earth," Solon said during negotiations on Friday in which he repeatedly rejected the texts other nations had been working on, while claiming to be working directly on the orders of his President.

"We cannot go along with a text that guarantees an increase in temperature to 4C," added Solon. "This is tantamount to making us responsible for a situation my President has described as genocide and ecocide."

Despite Bolivian objections, Patricia Espinosa, the Mexican Foreign Minister and COP16 President, approved the agreement. "The objections and complaints will be noted duly," said Espinosa. Her interpretation of UN rules was that all agreements must be reached in harmony, and this did not necessarily mean unanimity. "The rule of consensus does not mean unanimity," she said. She added that consensus did not allow "one delegation to impose a right of veto on the will of so much effort that has been fashioned and achieved... with huge sacrifices in so many cases."

Bolivia was one of the countries which opposed last year's Copenhagen Accord. This year, Solon said the failure to guarantee the future of the Kyoto Protocol, combined with the low-ambition of developed nations in setting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions was behind their refusal to cooperate.

Solon claimed that the manner in which Bolivia's position was overruled represented an "abuse of the framework agreement on climate protection".

On Sunday (12th December) Solon threatened to take court action to block the Cancun Agreement. "We will file a complaint with the International Court of Justice in The Hague against the text approved in Cancun," said Pablo Solon to Bolivian newspaper El Cambio.

The Cancun Agreement set a target to cut global carbon emissions in half by 2050, and restrict the global temperature target to 2C over pre-industrial times, with the option of increasing it to 1.5C. It acknowledged the need for identifying a time for global peaking of GHG emissions.

Bolivia does not think the agreement goes far enough and Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu, Chair of the Africa Group, seemed to agree, saying that science had been lost to politics.

"It is appearing more and more everyday that this has become a pledging club," said Mpanu-Mpanu of Friday. Countries are no longer basing goals on "what science requires," he said, and that "doesn't keep Africa safe."

Throughout the talks, the Africa group pleaded to developed nations to secure the survival of the Kyoto Protocol. However, Japan and Russia said they would oppose an extension after its first commitment period ends in 2012 as both favoured a single legally binding deal that covered all major emitters.

Despite this, some green groups welcomed the agreement.

"These are some of the substantial steps that we need to move forward with the negotiations to get a legally binding deal in Durban," Wendel Trio from Greenpeace International told SolveClimate News.

"This agreement was a remarkable turnaround for a multilateral approach to address climate change, including commitments on emissions from all the world's major economies," said Jennifer Morgan, Director of Climate and Energy for the World Resources Institute. "By consensus, countries agreed to a balanced package that includes targets and actions, increased transparency, the creation of a climate fund, and other important mechanisms to support developing countries," she added.

The general consensus was that COP16's role was to pave the way for a binding agreement at COP17 in Durban. The hope now is that COP17 can achieve this.

Author: Leroy Robinson | Climate Action

Image: Naturvernforbundet | Flickr