Group makes it clear that while they were fully cooperating with France to arrive at an agreement, they would like to see specific and clear provisions on financial support.

The countries forming the BASIC group — Brazil, South Africa, India and China — on Tuesday committed themselves to a comprehensive, balanced, ambitious and legally binding agreement emerging from the Paris Climate Change conference, but cautioned that it must not deviate from the differentiation principles that are already part of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

China, which has a parallel understanding with the United States on tackling climate change, joined the other developing countries in the bloc, but carefully skirted the divergence between the U.S. position and the stand of the developing countries on key topics.

Developing countries are being asked to adopt low carbon strategies as a commitment at COP21, but there are differences on what kind of funding would be provided for adaptation, loss and damage, and support actions. From India's perspective, events such as the Chennai and Uttarakhand floods and distressing crop failures due to drought are strongly linked to climate change, and an agreement for the future must have provisions for adaptation, and loss and damage. Even more precarious, India acknowledges, it the situation of small islands and Least Developed Countries.

On Tuesday, the BASIC group made it clear that while they were fully cooperating with France, which holds the presidency of the conference, to arrive at an agreement by Friday, they would like to see specific and clear provisions on financial support. There has been a campaign before COP21 got underway, to say substantial funding has already been mobilised — $62 billion, according to the OECD.

At a crowded joint media interaction, China’s special representative for climate change, Xie Zhenhua, gave the OECD report which claimed that $62 billion had been raised in 2014 a thumbs down, as an example of double counting. “We welcome OECD studies, but it has not been acknowledged by developed countries. This shows transparency is important. Developed countries should say how much they gave to whom, and recipients should say where they got the money and what they used it for,” he said.

India has already rejected the OECD report for the same reason, and argued that only $2.2 billion could be counted as new flows. Brazil and South Africa also said there was need for transparency to determine the real numbers on disbursement. Could loans or interest subsidy be included as climate funds?

On a second contentious issue, the review of Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) for the period after 2020, Union Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar said countries had made national choices of either a five-year or 10-year INDC. Moreover, the review provision in the Paris agreement that will compel all countries to live up to their pledges should consider not just reduction of carbon emissions [mitigation], but also adaptation and finance. This stand was endorsed by China, which wanted facilitative, non-punitive processes. Stocktaking should include adaptation and finance.

Pre-2020 action by all parties is part of the mandate given in the climate conference in Durban, South Africa four years ago. Towards this, developed countries should scale up their mitigation in the next five years, and then for the period beyond 2020, while developing countries can make voluntary bilateral donations or engage in other forms of South-South cooperation.

In the Copenhagen Accord of 2009, the reference to finance reads: “In the context of meaningful mitigation actions and transparency on implementation, developed countries commit to a goal of mobilising jointly $100 billion dollars a year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries. This funding will come from a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources of finance.”

BASIC countries are also facing pressure from the United States and the European Union to widen the base of countries making climate finance donations, although on a “voluntary” basis, covering emerging economies.

Long term ambition

The question of how much global warming is acceptable — the long term ambition — is yet to be resolved by developing countries. The small island states and Least Developed Countries want the Paris agreement to raise the ambition to 1.5 degrees C, a target that the Brazilian Minister, Izabella Teixeria, said the BASIC group and other nations were still discussing.

A statement was issued by the BASIC group to clarify its consensus position, particularly the non-negotiable nature of equity and the Common But Differentiated Responsibilities principles in the UNFCCC.

Mr. Javadekar gave terse answers to some questions from the international media, but was quickly supplemented by the articulate South African Environment Minister, Edna Bomo Molewa and her Brazilian counterpart.

Ms. Molewa, for instance, backed up the Indian Minister, to a question on another bloc, the Like-Minded Developing Countries, holding up progress in talks. Many countries were members of different groups, with their own red lines. They were in Paris to negotiate, and not stall.

About China and U.S. climate ties, Mr. Xie said, “We have an agreement. Before the year 2020 developed countries should mobilise $100 billion. We would urge developed countries to continue their support and encourage the countries with willingness to do to also make their contribution.”

At the Conference of the Parties, the French presidency has been working hard on bringing about consensus. It has set up ten groups of facilitators, led by Ministers and diplomats, who would take up each aspect of the text, including contentious issues such as the preamble, mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage, finance, forests, implementation and acceleration of the pre-2020 action by developed nations. The proceedings are being published online, to reach a consensus quickly.

Category: articles

Read More...

The French will hopefully find positive ways to understand what has just happened to them. A history of racism has not stopped France from becoming a multicultural society. Despite Islamophobia, the French have welcomed and lived with Europe’s largest Muslim population

Parisians are no strangers to violence. During the French Revolution in late 1793, the Reign of Terror swept across the city, killing more than 2,000 supposed ‘enemies of the revolution’. In 1871, the city played host to the largest European urban insurrection of the nineteenth century — the Paris Commune — in which nearly 10,000 Parisians were slaughtered.

A little less than a century later, at the height of the Algerian War in 1961, terrorism returned with a vengeance. In June that year, the pro-colonial militants of the Organisation Armée Secrète planted a bomb on a Strasbourg-Paris train, killing 28. And, in October, the brutal police repression of a pro-nationalist demonstration left up to 50 dead and bodies floating in the Seine.

This violent history has continued in more recent times, with terrorist bomb attacks by Hizbollah and Lebanese Islamists in 1986 and Algerian Islamists in 1995 during the Algerian Civil War. Most recently, of course, Paris endured the massacre of Charlie Hebdo journalists, and shoppers in a Jewish superstore, in January 2015.

Another site in a global conflict

None of this should take away from the shock that greeted the appalling coordinated attacks in Paris on November 13, 2015. The death toll and the scale make the latest events some of the bloodiest examples of terrorism in Europe, along with the Madrid bombings in 2004. For better or for worse, Paris has become another site in a global conflict that stretches from Mumbai and Peshawar to Bali and Beirut.

Nevertheless, the long history of violence in France can offer some clues into how an already fragile country might approach another shock to its social and political identity. In particular, three areas should hold our attention over the coming days and weeks: the implications of the attack for counter-terrorism in France; the impact on foreign and immigration policy; and the potential for a sharp rightward shift in French politics.

First, the question of counter-terrorism. It may come as a surprise to some, but France was long held up as a model of counter-terrorist and counter-insurgency strategy. The ruthless treatment meted out to anti-colonial activists in Indo-China and Algeria in the mid-twentieth century made the French army, police and intelligence services a model of how to root out ‘terrorism’. So much so that the torture of suspected political dissidents during the Algerian War in the 1950s and 1960s became a permanent blot on France’s reputation (and an inspiration for America’s War on Terror after 9/11).

And yet, if there is one thing that the Paris attacks show, it is that the only way to thwart Islamist terrorism in the short term is through old-fashioned intelligence and infiltration work. Ever since theCharlie Hebdo attacks, the French intelligence services have been expecting a major attack. The French government has strengthened the means and allocated a much larger number of police to counter-terrorism operations.

Strengthening the responses

But how much more can realistically be done? And how do democratic governments work within the constraints of Constitutions that are designed to protect citizens? Security services at major ports of entry in France are overwhelmed and the number of possible ‘suspects’ continues to grow. The suggestions by some right-wing politicians that the French police simply detain the 5,000 or more French citizens who are under surveillance (those in the so-called ‘fichiers S’ files) are neither legal nor workable. Worse, it is precisely this kind of profiling that stokes community, racial and religious tensions.

This problem of how to build an effective counter-terrorism strategy is directly connected to France’s foreign policy. France may be a fading, post-imperial power, but it is still more involved in global conflicts than almost any other European country. In recent years, French forces have fought Islamist movements in Mali, Libya and Syria. French security services have also been used across the Sahel to protect France’s significant natural resource extraction operations from Islamist militant groups who have repeatedly kidnapped or killed French workers.

France’s immigration policy is similarly intertwined with its foreign policy. Whether or not the November 13 attacks were committed by French citizens, foreigners or militants posing as refugees, the events will inevitably raise serious questions about France’s attitude to immigration and its participation in Europe’s Schengen free-movement zone.

This is in addition to long-standing problems relating to the treatment of postcolonial immigrant populations in France who have not been afraid to express their anger towards the French state (most recently, in the riots in France in 2005).

It is hard to say at this stage whether Friday’s attacks will signal a retreat from France’s global engagement and a closing of the borders. Or, on the contrary, whether the French will demand stronger action against Islamist militant groups abroad, a strategy that risks getting the French armed forces embroiled in new conflicts in West Asia and Africa.

Much of this will depend on the country’s political configuration, and it is here that the effects of the attacks will truly be felt. As has always been the case after events like this, once the dust has settled, the political battle will begin — and all the evidence suggests that it will be an ugly one.

Assertion from the right

Already, François Hollande is France’s most unpopular President, with approval ratings in recent polls that have oscillated around 15-20 per cent. He will have to face an emboldened centre-right under former President Nicolas Sarkozy that is looking for any opportunity to lampoon his — and the Socialist Party’s — supposedly ‘soft’ attitude to law and order.

More ominously, France faces the imminent threat of the Front National (FN), the country’s buoyant far-right party. Polls predicted that the FN would make big gains in next month’s regional elections, but there is every chance that last weekend’s events will swell the party’s ranks. Less than 24 hours after the attacks, the party’s leader Marine Le Pen was beginning her campaign by proclaiming that “France must rearm itself”. Her message will undoubtedly prove popular, and represents a real threat to France’s fragile political landscape.

Beyond party politics, however, there are reasons to think that the French will find more positive ways to understand or explain what has just happened to them. After all, a history of racism and inequality has not stopped France from becoming a complex, multicultural and mixed society. Likewise, the French have repeatedly found ways of discussing their bloody revolutionary and colonial histories despite the enormous controversy it has provoked.

And, for all the intolerance, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, the vast majority of French people since the 1980s have learnt to live with Europe’s largest Muslim population and become more open to foreigners in their midst.

This is not just starry-eyed utopianism. The most reliable tolerance index we have for France showed a notable increase in tolerant attitudes towards racial and religious minorities after the Charlie Hebdoshootings, exactly the opposite to what most people expected. There is plenty to be concerned about — not least widespread intolerance towards the Roma people in France and towards Muslims in general — but the figures give us a much more mixed picture of French attitudes than political rhetoric would suggest.

So which will it be? A France that moves on from this tragedy and accepts the de facto multiculturalism that is the reality of all European countries? Or a France that allows its intolerant minority to be politicised, polarised and amplified? It is still too early to know, but now that the French are firmly at the heart of a global conflict, the answer to this question should concern us all.

Category: articles

Read More...