I wasn’t planning to attend too many country meetings while here at Copenhagen. I feared that anything sponsored by one country in particular would be long on the bragging and short on the facts.

Despite this, yesterday I attended Haiti, Cuba and the Dominican Republic’s joint presentation on the Caribbean Biological Corridor, a collaborative effort to protect the biodiversity of the Caribbean. Currently Cuba has officially protected 15% of its land, the Dominican Republic 15% and Haiti less than 2%. (1) However, it’s currently not contiguous, even internally, and nominal protection never guarantees actual protection.

While it took 20 minutes to finally begin the meeting, five minutes into the presentation it became painfully apparent that the “Caribbean Biological Corridor” was not a road to biodiversity, but some xkcd-inspired highway engineer’s nightmare. (2)

From the lecture, and my own research online, the lack of concrete facts speaks for itself. The three countries presented no plan, no timeline, no goals, and, over the course of the conversation, kept changing their message. At the onset, the gist was that they would like to collaborate to create a nature preserve, and were seeking funds to do so. They anticipated that this project would improve the health of the countries while protecting ecosystems vulnerable to climate change. Toward the end, climate change dropped out of picture, and the message was that the funds would be funneled into development for the poor (how?), and that the increased tourism generated from the corridor would help the countries develop. Not to mention the other problems with their proposed collaboration: three different languages, very diverse populations, and much political instability. The presentation was obviously unrehearsed and no provision had been made for a running translation for the presenters or the audience … the only translator was the Haitian minister’s personal one, who was pressed into service to translate between French, Spanish and English.

I don’t want to waste too much time discussing the corridor; I’d point you to other resources, but I can’t find any. (If you can, please let me know!) The main point to distill from this is a sense of desperation.

No, I would never support such an ill-defined proposal. However, I sympathize with their motivation to hide human development under the veil of climate change. (Which may be under another veil of corruption, but that’s beside the point.) Poverty has never been high on the world’s list of Problems We Must Solve Now. But suddenly we have an issue–climate change–which is Number One, and is very related to human development. Of course interested countries, organizations, and individuals are going to jump on board.

The truth is that developing nations must be incorporated into climate change action (which they are (3) ). To cut developing countries out of an international agreement saddles them with the consequences of a warming climate to which they contributed very little. Inclusion is necessary, not simply for humanitarian reasons, but because the turmoil they will experience in the coming years can not help but affect the developed world.

Pretty much any action that would be taken to mitigate or adapt to climate change has human development aspects. Electrification (4), REDD (see Rachel’s blog, or (4), (5)), agriculture and food security policies (6), or water resource management, must deal with human development.

And with the frustration that so many developing nations must feel about their status in the world, it becomes more understandable why some are grasping at straws. But it is not excusable. For countries to propose projects which are so blatantly unstructured undermines all of the legitimate, concrete projects being proposed. Projects such as climate proofing energy systems (8) and eliminating inefficiencies in steel, iron and cement industries (9), are just two proposed projects and recommendations for action based on research and country-specific investigation. One project already in effect is in Coasta Rica. There deforestation has declined ten-fold from 1977-2005, and the country has been compensated for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. (10) Of course, even well planned programs are not without hiccups. But unplanned projects have no hope and damage public opinion toward legitimate proposals.

(1) http://www.biodiversityhotspots.org/xp/hotspots/caribbean/Pages/conservation.aspx

(2) http://xkcd.com/253/

(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Development_Mechanism

(4) http://ec.europa.eu/europeaid/where/acp/regional-cooperation/energy/documents/rural_and_periurban_electrification_position_paper_en.pdf

(5) http://www.redd-monitor.org/redd-an-introduction/

http://www.un-redd.org/AboutREDD/tabid/582/language/en-US/Default.aspx

(6) http://agricultureday.org/

(8) HELIO International

(9) Center for Clean Air Policy

(10) http://rainforests.mongabay.com/20costarica.htm

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 12:25 pm and is filed under Climate Change for Tiny Tim (A Christmas Carol) by Claire. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.