Durban was briefly in the climate spotlight with just months to go before the 20th anniversary of the 2012 Rio Earth Summit. Few of us at Rio in 1992 would have believed that so little progress would be made in the intervening years. Climate procrastination has put future generations at severe risk of increasingly dangerous climate disruptions. We have seen how national and international governments and institutions responded to the 2008 financial crisis in just two crucial days, but also how, in two crucial decades, they have achieved very little on the much deeper climate crisis. Nature neither defers decisions nor haggles; nor, as widely observed after the financial crisis, does nature do bailouts.
2012 is also the 25th anniversary of the Brundtland Commission's report on Sustainable Development. On the issue of climate change, the report says: "The key question is: How much certainty should governments require before agreeing to take action? If they wait until significant climate change is demonstrated, it may be too late for any countermeasures to be effective against the inertia by then stored in this massive global system. The very long time lags involved in negotiating international agreement on complex issues involving all nations have led some experts to conclude that it is already late."
Twenty-five years on, SustainAbility recently interviewed the report's chair, Gro Harlem Brundtland, in one of a series of videos to be released in 2012. Looking back, she sees as "sensational" the progress made in securing agreement to the Climate Convention at the Rio Earth Summit, but recognises that national pressures on governments continue to impede real progress by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. She calls on all parts of society and especially business to help drive and lobby for positive change by policymakers.
It is hard to conclude, in light of the (lack of) progress since that report was written, that global policymakers will show the necessary leadership on climate - now or in coming years - to avoid catastrophic weather pattern disruptions. The latest extreme weather events report from the IPCC leaves little room for doubt that we are on an irreversible track for weather pattern shifts which will overwhelm our adaptive capacity. All rational responses and principles of precautionary action have been betrayed by narrow self-interest and refusal to see that the greater global good should prevail.
So just how did the Climate Convention progress? As COP 17 opened, I wrote: "While we must hope - and all push for - substantive progress in Durban, one thing is certain: the very best we might anticipate from COP 17 will be inadequate to meet the 2° challenge. The most likely longer term outcome of this multilateral process will be the adoption of the lowest common climate denominators; a welcome but inadequate response". And a welcome but inadequate response is what we got. It was, however, massively more successful than the best hoped for by those of us who have been on the COP rollercoaster for 17 years. The risk of total derailment has been averted and the carriages of all countries have finally been hitched up to negotiate a universally binding treaty by 2020. As I constantly repeat, probably too little, too late; but a positive signal to liberate the latent energy of countries, cities, communities and corporations to take unilateral, bilateral and multilateral climate actions.
In line with our mission, we at SustainAbility are most interested in driving proactive climate responses by corporations. After the collapse of the COP 15 negotiations in Copenhagen and in advance of COP 16, we called for business leaders to acknowledge and to leverage their unique ability to lessen the carbon intensity of their entire value chains. The moral imperative for businesses to act increases, we argued, in proportion to the deepening policy vacuum. Beyond that, there are also powerful business imperatives to act now: these include avoiding market and supply chain disruptions; protecting physical assets; and anticipating the inevitable increases in carbon emission and energy costs.
The most progressive companies have already demonstrated what is possible. A current leader in corporate sustainability ambition is Unilever with its Sustainable Living Plan. Their commitment is to de-couple the environmental impacts of their products from revenue growth. Climate is a key focus: by 2020 Unilever "aims to halve the greenhouse gas impact of our products across the lifecycle - from the sourcing of raw materials, through to consumer use and disposal". Walmart too, is doing its part to lead other companies to a low-carbon future using its purchasing power to drive emissions reductions through its supply chain. Unilever and other progressive companies have set the standard by which all businesses must now assess their ambitions.
The very best outcome from Durban was never going to be equal to the full climate challenge we face, but this COP has made some major strides in securing a long-term mitigation roadmap with legal force, and may prove in the long run 'a good COP' after all.
Geoff Lye is Chairman of SustainAbility - a think tank and strategy consultancy working to inspire transformative business leadership on the sustainability agenda