A global deal on climate change depends on building trust, says Geoffrey Lean, veteran environmental journalist and editor of the UN Environment Programme’s magazine Our Planet.
Just how fast global warming is changing the world can be measured by the northern polar ice cap, says Geoffrey Lean. ‘In 1997 I wrote a story about a leading scientist predicting that it would melt entirely during the summer months by the end of this century. It caused quite a stir at the time. But the same scientist, a gentle and most un-alarmist man, has now just concluded it will be mostly gone by 2020 and all by 2030.’
A new global deal to limit the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming is urgently needed. Without it the world will see increasing famines, floods, and mass migrations. But Lean says whether or not a new treaty can be signed at December’s UN summit on climate change in Copenhagen largely hinges on just one word—‘trust’.
‘Unusually for UN negotiations virtually every country wants to strike a deal,’ he explains. ‘There is even general agreement on what its main provisions should be. The developed countries would agree to cut their emissions heavily, the rapidly industrializing ones would agree strongly to cut the rate at which they are growing, and both would contribute to a fund to help the poorest and most vulnerable nations of all take their own action to control the pollution and adapt to the devastating effects of climate change.
‘Indeed some of this is already happening. Rich country commitments to make cuts are inching up and countries like China, India, Mexico, Brazil and other poor countries are now promising to reduce the growth of their emissions far further than anyone predicted.
‘But nevertheless the negotiations are hopelessly bogged down, and much of this is due to lack of trust. The problems round the table are at least as big as those on the table.’
One example arose at the last negotiating session in Bangkok in October, adds Lean, who with over 40 years of reporting on green issues is one of the world’s most experienced environmental commentators. ‘Developing countries walked out of a meeting, accusing the rich of trying to kill the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the existing treaty on climate change, which the US has never signed, because it never committed developing countries to reducing their carbon emissions. They are attached to it, and want it extended and revised, because it recognizes their right to develop. But in America, the words Kyoto Protocol are toxic. Nobody supports it.
‘If there is trust between the negotiators then this is resolvable,’ Lean continues. ‘You could take the best of Kyoto, add it to a different treaty and call it something else.’ But, as it is, the poor say, “They are trying to stab us in the back.” And the rich countries counter, “Can’t they see that we can’t do this? Why are they being so stupid?” These are very human factors on a national scale. But it is these kinds of bombs that blow up if you don’t have trust.’
Lean warns about ‘the huge legacy of human reactions that have built up over the years of negotiations, not just on climate but on rich-poor negotiations. People tend to think the worst of each other rather than the best. So though everyone wants a deal [at Copenhagen], they leap, like in a marriage going wrong, on the worst interpretation of each others’ behaviour.’
Moreover, many politicians vote, not in the world’s interest, or even their national interest, but in the interests of their own constituencies or lobbyists representing coal, oil or cars. ‘So there are huge moral challenges out there. Unless they are resolved we won’t get agreement.’
Lean sees hope in ‘the most successful environmental treaty of all times’: the Montreal Protocol on the depletion of the protective ozone layer in the upper atmosphere caused by chemical pollutants. It was put together by the ‘rumbustious’ Egyptian Mostafa Tolba, then the Executive Director of the UN’s Environment Programme. ‘One of his negotiating tactics was to put the 15 or so key negotiators in the worst room in the conference centre and keep them there till they reached agreement. He was tough. But he also realized very early on that without trust nothing happened, and put enormous effort to building it.’
The wording of the final treaty was so delicate it could not be translated from the English into the other five UN languages, because the changing nuances would have bust the deal. But once it was signed industries saw the world had changed and moved very fast to introduce new substances. ‘It was really tight: without that trust you could never have got it.’
A leader could yet pull off a similar miracle in Copenhagen. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown is putting a huge amount of work into it. And Lean hopes that President Obama will make the 301 mile journey from Oslo, where he will accept the Nobel Peace Prize, during the conference. ‘Could the American President, by heading straight to Denmark after collecting his prize, actually demonstrate why he was the right pick for the honour?’ he wrote recently. [In fact, President Obama travelled to Oslo via Copenhagen.]
Geoffrey Lean wanted to be a journalist from his early teenage years. Joining the Yorkshire Post as a young reporter in 1969, he was put on the environment beat which he regarded at first as a backwater. But the issue was just reaching prominence and he was much influenced by ‘giants’ like Barbara Ward and EF Schumacher. ‘Within a few months I was hooked.’
At that time it was illegal to name and shame British industries, water companies or local authorities that polluted rivers. But a loophole in the law allowed him to expose Britain’s 20 top river polluters. His report led to a change in the law.
After the Yorkshire Post he was in charge of covering the environment for first The Observer and then The Independent on Sunday—serving 16 years on both papers—and is now Contributing Editor, Environment, at The Daily Telegraph. He has won a string of awards, including the prestigious Martha Gellhorn Prize for investigative journalism in 2002 and the Scoop of the Year Award in the 2001 British Press Awards (the UK equivalent of the Pulitzers) and the London Press Awards, for exposing the Labour Government’s secret genetically modified crop experiments. Ironically Tony Blair, then Prime Minister, presented him with the London award.
Last year, calamity struck when Lean’s home burned down. Luckily he and his wife Judy were away on holiday at the time. Their son would have been asleep in the burning building but at the last minute decided to stay the night with a friend. As they drove back home, not knowing what they would find, they decided to rebuild the house as green as they could afford. It has proved much more difficult than they thought: when we spoke the foundations were down, but Lean still did not know how it would be heated or what the walls would be made of!
Lean insists that going green does not mean a hair shirt existence, but is the best way to stimulate economic growth. He himself is trying to put this into practice, by walking the reporting.
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