The Minilateralist Incentive: A Climate Change Conference in Colombia

Not much good comes from war. Qualifying exceptions, however, can be found. The United Nations, tarnished, libelled and mocked for being simultaneously ineffectual and intrusive, was the mediating entity for international relations that grew from the calamities of the Second World War. Without that somewhat frail body, it is hard to imagine how the patchwork of human rights, however uneven, could have been stitched. The Iran War, and the consequential choking of the Strait of Hormuz by Tehran and Washington respectively have also had an unintended, meliorating effect. If the pressing dangers of climate change cannot push fossil fuel exporters and consumers to wean themselves off their diet of extraction and carbon emission, the panic caused by economic shock may well do the trick.

Despite the pageantry that circles around the now familiar Conferences of the Parties (COPs) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), progress on limiting the rise of global temperature remains tardy and constipated. The annual COP talks have become ceremonies of fatigue and inanition, often influenced by petrostates and avid fossil fuel lobbyists. The COP30 talks held in Brazil last November typified the mood. The final COP 30 agreement, entitled “Global Mutirão: Uniting humanity in a global mobilization against climate change,” failed to even mention the role of fossil fuels. (The same can be said of the 2015 Paris Agreement.) Fossil fuels – that devil in the detail – only debuts in the 2023 COP28 conference, with the call to transition “away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.”

The insipid outcome of COP30 was enough to spur Colombia and the Netherlands to announce their co-hosting of the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels, a step as part of the Belém Declaration on the Transition Away from Fossil Fuels. “This will be,” explained Irene Vélez Torres, Colombia’s Minister for Environment and Sustainable Development, “a broad intergovernmental, multisectoral platform complementary to the UNFCCC [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] designed to identify legal, economic, and social pathways that are necessary to make the phasing out of fossil fuels.”

The talks that began on April 24 at the coastal town of Santa Marta, Colombia, are the genesis of that promise. While the list of attendees has conspicuous omissions – the United States, China and India are not among their number – a number of prominent fossil fuel states are. Such absentees as the US did not trouble Torres. “We knew they weren’t going to be here. We weren’t expecting them to be here because their energy policy and their economic policy is to ‘drill, baby, drill’.” Not only would the conference not be for them, Torres could express her relief that no one would be “boycotting” the endeavour.

Among the 60 states, we find Australia, Canada and Nigeria. Likewise Brazil, the United Kingdom and the European Union. Countries heavily dependent on such commodities – Pakistan and the Philippines, for instance – are also on the list of participants.

The format of the conference purposely departs from the clumsy, ungainly model of the COP talks. The gathering is smaller and winnowed of any potential saboteurs and fossil fuel touters. It comprises an academic conference, a people’s summit and two days of more formal engagements between government officials. Individuals from the private sector have also been invited, but only those sympathetic to the conference’s principles and aims.

The eventual report produced by the co-hosts will take into account discussions and deliberations premised on three pillars. The first deals with economic dependence on fossil fuels, a particularly critical matter for poorer states unable or challenged in achieving an energy transition. The second focuses on how best to deal with the supply and demand of fossil fuels, a problem aggravated by the current energy crisis. The third pillar is built around “international cooperation and climate diplomacy” which can cover such matters as the problematic investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system. ISDS has offered much security and succour to fossil fuel companies keen to protect their investments against the perceived predations of climate change policies.

Wopke Hoekstra, the EU’s climate commissioner, explained the importance of the gathering to Politico: “It is hugely important that the Colombians and the Dutch and others have set this up, because we all see how wrecked the COP process is, how vulnerable it is to naysayers and those who want to derail it.” The unifying theme here was “the need to find an alternative. And if anything, world events of the last six weeks have proven them right.”

The scientists are sticking, understandably, to the message of environmental danger. “Breaking through 1.5°C means we enter a far more dangerous world – with more frequent and intense droughts, floods, fires and heatwaves – and we are already approaching critical tipping points in major Earth systems,” says the consistently gloomy Johan Rockströmm, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Change. But the energy supply crisis produced by the Iran War may well reinvigorate what seemed to be an expiring patient.

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