THE Philippines should not ratify the 2015 Paris climate agreement that was forged during the 21st Conference of Parties last December 2015, because the country will be worse under it, Albay Rep. Joey Salceda, former co-chairman of the United Nations Green Climate Fund.
Salceda has criticized the Paris accord as early as February when he branded it as a “bad agreement” because it shifts the responsibility of reducing carbon emissions to developing countries and away from industrialized nations that have “actually caused untold damage to the environment” in previous decades.
The Paris agreement is a compilation of pledges to hold the increase of global average temperature to “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and “to pursue efforts to limit temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”
Salceda, however, said the global average of “well below 2°C limit of temperature increase” in reality would translate into much more than that in the developing world—with more than 4 degrees for Africa alone.
President Rodrigo Duterte himself has criticized the Paris deal and threatened not to have it ratified. He has ordered a review of the “crazy” commitments the Philippines may have made when it signed the accord last April. He said as much in his July 25 State of the Nation Address.
The Senate has issued a statement it will not ratify the treaty following Duterte’s pronouncement.
Salceda, who was among the first to voice opposition to the Paris deal, however, said Manila’s signature on it does not mean final commitment, for which reason it has to be ratified by the Senate.
The United States, he pointed out was a signatory, too to the Kyoto Protocol, but chose not to become a Party to it. In an article he wrote last February, he lamented that “Western-dominated media hailed the COP21 Paris Agreement but ignored the dissenting voices from developing countries including the Philippines.”
Ratification for the Philippines, Salceda said, means looking into what was put on the table as our “intended nationally determined contributions which were mainly formulated under the tutelage of developed countries, without consultations with concerned sectors of our society.”
Ratifying the accord, he warned, “may lock our people in poverty for the rest of their existence until we are completely annihilated by continued extreme weather events.”
An active climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction campaigner, Salceda said the Philippines has been fulfilling its commitments for over 20 years under the Kyoto Protocol.
“Despite our state of development, our country has honored its UN climate commitments under the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol, currently the only two treaty instruments on climate change that are in force. The Paris agreement has not entered into force yet and is, therefore not legally binding yet on the Philippines,” he added.
Salceda explained that while Philippines signed the agreement in April 2016, its signature, under international law, creates only an obligation under Art. 18(a) of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties to “refrain from acts which would defeat the object or purpose of the treaty. . . . until it shall have made its intention clear not to become a party to the treaty.”
If the Senate ratifies the Paris agreement, the Philippines will have committed to severely cut by 70 percent its greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030 from 2000 levels, if it gets support from developed nations to convert to clean technologies.
Salceda said the Philippines pledge, like those of other developing countries, was made on two motivations: 1) that it would be matched with the same commitment by developed countries, which did not materialize, and; 2) it was conditional on financing and technology transfer which also was not provided.
Based on the two unfulfilled criteria, Salceda lamented, developed countries have “transformed ambition into folly.” The Kyoto deal was aimed at curbing emissions but only 19 countries including France and island-states threatened by rising sea levels have so far ratified it. To be effective, the agreement needs ratification by 55 countries, equivalent to 55 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions.
“We cannot join the (Paris) agreement because its purpose will spell disaster for our people and country, because even with all the contributions by developing countries, there will still be a huge gigatonne gap that can only be bridged if developed countries will do what they said they would, since twenty years ago, and have not done,” said Salceda.
“The overall effect of the Paris Agreement is a weakening of the commitments by developed countries under the Convention, a shift of those commitments to developing countries without any certainty of predictable and accessible financial resources to them. All those ‘intended national contributions’ are then subject to review, previously limited only to developed countries under the Convention,” he concluded.