COP Durban 2011: The Law of the Land

The Climate Caravan of Hope arrives in Kabale in Uganda, en route to Durban.

IUCN, UNEP, CITES, and many more, these acronyms characterise the necessary bureaucracy which surrounds the field of environmental law. So too do the plethora of treaties and accords, protocols and proposals, conventions and commissions. For months at a time, cities such as Rio, Copenhagen, Nairobi and this month Durban host delegates and their entourages, filling the hotels in the embassy quarters, bumping the income of taxi drivers and leaving in their wake a general mood of anticlimax. The pace of progress for many is frustratingly slow, and the implementation of seemingly simple policy can take decades.

To an outsider such as myself, the process seems to be filled with empty rhetoric and wasted opportunity. My classes in environmental law this year had me switching from optimism to pessimism regularly. The EU court of Justice works effectively to fine France €2 Million for failing to prevent the extinction of the European Hamster in Alsace, and yet continues to allow the depletion of Mediterranean fish stocks. Grand statements made by the United Nations to halt declines in biodiversity by 2010 at the World Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg back in 2002 show the international awareness of the problem, but the results of this endeavour are laughable now.

And so to Durban, where it is hard not to pessimistic about the drafting of laws to combat climate change. The global economic crisis has overshadowed the need for a global binding agreement on carbon emissions, but it has not prevented the delegates to set up a much needed multibillion dollar green fund. This will help developing countries strengthen their defences against induced climatic conditions. However, throwing money at a problem will not solve it, and the longer we delay the implementation of comprehensive laws, the more likely we are to reach a state where the world is "locked in" to a carbon based system. The bureaucrats with their briefcases full of conventions are tied to their countries positions, and their respective governments are tied to the corporations lining their pockets. How to break the cycle?