British call for international climate watchdog
A new report from the British Government calls for the creation of new powerful institutions to ensure that countries meet their obligations to cut carbon emissions.
Rie Jerichow, COP15 Copenhagen, 13/05/2009 10:40
The British Department for International Development recommends the creation of powerful surveillance and enforcement mechanisms to combat climate change. To ensure that countries meet their commitments to cut carbon emissions, the new institutions should be given the capacity to make intrusive inspections to measure emissions in the same way that inspectors from the IAEA now oversee nuclear facilities, the Guardian reports.
”This implies a significant pooling of sovereignty, greater coercive powers at international level and significant investment in surveillance and research,” the authors, Alex Evans and David Steven, write in the report published by the Center on International Co-operation at New York University but commissioned by the British Department for International Development.
”Carbon default, in other words, would become as weighty an issue as sovereign default, or failure to comply with a security council resolution. That this should currently seem inconceivable indicates the extent of the shift in understanding that is still needed… It seems inevitable that a long-term climate deal will ultimately require an 'all or nothing' approach to international participation. Either countries play a full part in the system, or they sit outside the international system and are effectively barred from all forms of international co-operation,” the authors write.
The report warns that an effective solution to global warming could be delayed, if a deal in Copenhagen is not secured against cheating, fraud and corrupt officials.
”Copenhagen represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to set climate goals that avoid dangerous temperature rises, and it is vital that we ensure effective reform of global institutions as part of this,” a spokesman from the Department for International Development tells the Guardian.
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