This is not a report on the details of the negotiations, why they broke down, or what was or wasn't agreed upon before all the name-calling and finger pointing started. It's a discussion about equity at the COP, the ways that people were talking about it, and what it might mean for the future.

Equity in the text

First of all, there were at least two negotiating documents in which equity was actually mentioned. In both the CDM and JI texts, China and its allies attempted to insert language defining equity as "relate[d] to equitable per capita emission entitlements for developing country Parties," but this language had no operational implications. Folks who were watching more closely told us that this language would repeatedly disappear, then reappear, and then disappear again. Obviously, there was something going on. In any case its status isn't at all clear at this point, at least not to us.

Ironically, the key issue that stalled the talks -- the ability of the US (and other Umbrella Group nations) to get credit for forest regrowth -- is actually a huge equity issue. If the US is able to get credit for the regrowth of trees it cut down in the past two centuries, but developing countries are fully liable for land use changes regardless of whether they support domestic agriculture or timber export, then even equal per capita allocations will be unequal in practice (more about this, and sinks as part of the complexity trap, in another issue). For now, note that it was opposition from the EU about the "ecological integrity" implications of the sinks loophole, not from the G77 about the long-term equity implications, that was the focus of the ultimately fatal dispute.

Still, for a topic that was barely on the official agenda, equity was nevertheless very big in The Hague, probably bigger than it's ever been at a COP. It was talked about at side events every day, sponsored by groups old and new, radical and mainstream. Nevertheless the equity sub-current was easy to underestimate, and if you were concentrating on the ins and outs of the negotiations it was easy to miss seeing how big a deal it was. Even when French President Chirac concluded his plenary speech with "France proposes that we set as our ultimate objective the convergence of per capita emissions" (http://www.info-france-usa.org/news/statmnts/hague.htm), it was easy to just go back to the details of the thread you were following -- nukes, tech transfer, public participation, sinks, whatever -- and miss its significance.

The Hague Mandate

Because it was clear in advance that developing country commitments -- which is where the equity rubber meets the road -- were not going to be on the agenda, NGOs who wanted to press the issue advocated for a strong per capita position to be adopted in a resolution, a la the Berlin Mandate. (Perhaps it's fortunate that it wasn't passed, so we're spared referring to "the The Hague Mandate".) Sponsored by Friends of the Earth International, the call for The Hague Mandate had very strong motivating language with a clear call for per capita allocations, but the only action it called for was for the parties to study the issue prior to the next COP. More than 85 organizations signed on, but in spite of the fact that it was circulated on the Climate Action Network (CAN) mailing list, only five US groups are counted among them. (The text is at: http://www.foeeurope.org/dike/news/1001-01en.htm; the list of signers at: http://www.foeeurope.org/dike/news/1001-01.htm).

In the end, it never stood a chance. When presented with the call for a Hague Mandate at the dyke-building event on the Saturday in the middle of the COP, President Pronk (despite his own previous words of support for per capita emissions) is reported to have angrily told the FOE sponsors that it was inappropriate and unhelpful to be pushing such a thing at this meeting.

Equity on the side

It would be impossible to report on all of the equity side events that took place, or the organizations that sponsored them. However, it's worth looking both at the ways in which some of the groups that have long been active on equity took advantage of the situation, and at some of the groups with a new focus on equity (or new groups with a focus on equity).

There are two groups that are most associated with the call for equal per capita rights to the atmosphere. The first is India's Center for Science and the Environment. Their 1991 article, "Global Warming in an Unequal World," written by Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain, is a landmark in the debate on equity and climate change -- it lays out the case for equal per capita rights in a way that all subsequent discussions have had to address. CSE (http://www.cseindia.org) has continued to push the argument for equal per capita rights, and had a very significant presence at The Hague. Agarwal (who we will interview in our next issue) unfortunately has had cancer and was in ill health; while present in The Hague, he did not actually attend the conference itself for many days, and Sunita Narain took his place on a number of panels. CSE organized its own side event, and also published an excellent newsletter during the conference, called "Equity Watch" (see http://www.equitywatch.org).

The second group with a long track record of advocating per capita equity is UK's Global Commons Institute. Some of you will have heard of "Contraction and Convergence," which is the framework that the GCI has given to their argument for equity; others may even have heard of Aubrey Meyer, the organization's founder. GCI held a large side event on Thursday of the first week, which drew more than 100 people (large for a side event), and later organized a press conference where Andrew Dlugolecki, Director of General Insurance Development at CGNU (one of the world's largest insurance groups) told the media that: "In the current circumstances, the Kyoto Protocol is becoming almost irrelevant. Contraction and Convergence has the potential to break the deadlock."

For those of you who aren't familiar with the GCI's famous multi-colored graphs, Contraction and Convergence refers to a contraction from current emissions levels to "safe" levels, allowing also for a period of growth for total developing country emissions; and "convergence" to equal per capita allocations of emissions rights. The framework assumes that convergence to equal per capita allocations takes place over some transition period (e.g., a few decades), and that allocations are tradable, so that actual per capita emissions may or may not actually converge. An increasing number of organizations and politicos, including a bloc of European Environment Ministers, a variety of international environmental NGOs as well as traditional NGOs like the Red Cross and Christian Aid, Britain's influential Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, the co-chair of the IPCC's all-important Working Group One, and a rich variety of Southern politicians have explicitly endorsed it, and many who don't use the same term have implicitly adopted the same framework. (It must be said, however, that some organizations with a strong commitment to per capita equity don't support internationally traded permits; this is an important discussion, which we will take up further in subsequent issues.)

There was another significant thread to the equity discussion at the Hague, and this was a series of side events largely organized by European groups which focused on "burden sharing" of future (post Kyoto) reduction commitments. These discussions, however, tended to be very technical, focusing on complex modeling results and lacking clear principles for actually making allocation decisions. Moreover, as CSE's Sunita Narain pointed out (she was part of a panel responding to a number of modeling presentations), the issue is not fundamentally one of sharing the burden of reducing emissions, but of sharing the atmospheric resource that the North has been overconsuming. This very different framing has a very different implication for conceiving the relationship between the potential reductions to be made by Northern countries and the future emissions limits to be adopted by developing countries.

Domestic Equity

An especially interesting new component to the equity debate was a real focus on questions of domestic equity; that is, the fairness of climate policies to different constituencies inside various countries. Redefining Progress (http://www.rprogress.org), an Oakland, CA based NGO with a history of work on sustainable economics, brought over several well-known activists from the US environmental justice movement to address equity issues in the US context. And another California based NGO, Corporate Watch (http://www.corpwatch.org/trac/climate/) together with a group of like- minded European organizations, sponsored an entire two-day offsite "Climate Justice Summit" which brought together activists from the US, Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America to talk about the impacts of the fossil fuel industry and climate change more generally on communities and workers around the world. Finally, but very significantly, there was a side event organized by a US labor coalition, with participation from the SEIU, the Center for Sustainable Economics and the Economic Policy Institute. These groups have been focusing on the prospects for a "just transition" in the US, addressing the needs of individuals and communities (such as coal miners) who would inevitably be impacted by any meaningful climate treaty. This coalition has organized a substantial review of the needs and perceived needs of labor unions in a climate response, and has subsequently been developing models to allow them to estimate the employment and economic-output implications of various transition policies.

This is hardly an exhaustive list of the equity-related activities at the convention. There was, for example, a significant group present from the University of Tampere Finland, who organized a side event and were distributing an excellent book on climate justice. There was a great panel called "Beyond Kyoto: Cutting Global Carbon Emissions in Half" sponsored by Canada's David Suzuki Foundation (http://www.davidsuzuki.org), which was notable for the density with which it interwove technical and equity issues. Presenting organizations included CSE, the British Royal Commission on Environmental Policy (which has explicitly recommended Contraction and Convergence to the British government as its approach to climate equity), and the Tellus Institute (http://www.tellus.org), a US think tank and, notably, one of the more progressive US organizations regarding equity. Also, Christian Aid and the New Economics Foundation presented some powerful material on the North's "Ecological Debt" at a couple of side events.

Equity organizing into the future

Near the end of the conference, EcoEquity and the Dutch group INZET organized a meeting of a de facto "Equity Caucus," including individuals from at least a dozen organizations, where we discussed the possibility for a last-minute action at the Conference (that we wisely decided not to undertake), and set up a network for planning subsequent international collaboration, including hopefully an international meeting in the coming months. All this, however, was before we learned that there was going to be a COP 6.5, or that Bush was in fact going to be President of the US, so we'll have to evaluate our short-term work in this light.

Supporters of climate justice, and equal per capita rights in particular, have to deal with this limbo just like everyone else. But because our focus has always been in some sense "post-Kyoto," the issues we face are somewhat particular. The deadlock in The Hague offers new possibilities for North-South dialogue (e.g. a "European Leadership Initiative"), which could even take new impetus as US climate politics suffer regression. Indeed, the next four years may offer an opportunity for NGOs to lift themselves out of the details of the Kyoto negotiations and redirect their attention to winning public support for the necessary serious, long-term changes.

The climate change problem won't go away; the release of the Third Assessment Report makes this quite clear. The opposition to Kyoto has been winning in part because the problem isn't yet immediate, but as the temperature and sea levels rise, the need for a meaningful global cap will become increasingly clear and urgent. And dividing up a global budget means coming up with a formula that is fair to the countries that are losing the cheap-fossil-fuel development path. It really is that simple. Equity will be at the table.

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