On the first Monday of October, a very significant environmental meeting was held in Washington, D.C. It was a meeting that policymakers in the developing countries (the South) should take close note of because it could ultimately have serious economic and environmental impacts on their future.
The all-day meeting was called by the White House as a preparatory step towards the formulation of the U.S. negotiating position for the forthcoming climate change negotiations to be held in Kyoto, Japan, later this year. The meeting could possibly not have had a higher profile. It was actively chaired by President Bill Clinton with Vice President Al Gore and half their cabinet in attendance. The four panels included the leading lights of the U.S. academia, corporations and labor movement with presentations from key policy players, including the secretaries of State, Energy and the Treasury. However, the meeting was significant not simply because of who was there or the high level of concern that the issue is generating. The meeting was significant _ at least from a developing country perspective-because it seemed to spell a new direction in U.S. policy towards them.
As one observer commented, ``probably never before has the phrase `developing country responsibility' been used as often and with such enthusiasm at such a high-level environmental meeting that is supposedly on U.S. policy.'' Despite the blurred rhetoric of the meeting, the message seemed to be that for the industrialized world (the North) to be able to do anything on climate change, the South would also have to do its ``share.'' Although the exact magnitude of this share was never laid out, it was very obvious that the U.S. will look unfavorably at any treaty that does not also spell out binding emission restrictions for the developing countries. What this means is the unraveling of the finely crafted principle of ``shared but differentiated'' responsibility in international environmental policy.
If this turns out to be so, it would mean that the developing countries, including Korea, would be asked to make ``similar,'' if not the same, percentage emission. This, despite the fact that the historical and current responsibility for the carbon emissions lies squarely with the industrialized countries (80 percent of the emissions come from the 20 percent of the world population living in the North). More importantly, this despite the fact that the so-called ``Berlin Mandate'' of 1995 (to which the U.S. is a signatory) specifically promises that South will NOT be asked to forfeit its development aspirations in the name of global warming.
Given how closely carbon emissions are linked to energy, doing anything to significantly combat the threat of global warming cannot possibly be cheap. For the U.S. (which produces 22 per cent of all emissions) the cost could run into hundreds of billions of dollars; even for countries like Korea which contributes a fraction thereof, the cost would be mammoth enough to put the entire economy in disarray. While the urgency of doing something about climate change is very real, the poor of the developing world cannot afford to pay the environmental bills of the industrialized rich. At this critical juncture in the negotiations, it is vital that policy-makers in the South recognize this not-so-subtle shift in U.S. policy, understand its dire implications, and develop a concerted strategy to respond to it.