Just before negotiators at the United Nations Climate Change Summit, in Paris, released the final text of their agreement, on December 12th, the members of the Alliance of Small Island States started to sing. They continued for five minutes, a group of more than eighty delegates from forty-four low-lying coastal and island countries, through weeping and cheering and bursts of applause, until the chorus of Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” had been repeated many times over. The words of that refrain—“Every little thing gonna be all right”—were understood by everybody to be an overstatement. For all the promise of the agreement, the alliance still has plenty to worry about. Many island nations have recently seen their populations displaced by severe flooding and erosion, their food supply disrupted by increasing soil salinity and ocean acidification, and, in several cases, large portions of their G.D.P. wiped out by extreme weather events. To the critics, like Helen Szoke, of Oxfam Australia, who have denounced the agreement as “a frayed lifeline to the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people,” the Marley song might have sounded like a grin-and-bear-it response to a raw deal.
And yet the leaders of many nations, including those that the U.N. categorizes as least developed countries (L.D.C.s), described the agreement as a victory. The Angolan diplomat Giza Gaspar Martins, who chaired the group of forty-eight L.D.C.s in the negotiations, praised it as “the best outcome we could have hoped for.” Olai Uludong, Palau’s ambassador to the European Union, called it “remarkable.” India’s environment minister, Prakash Javadekar, said that it constituted “a new chapter of hope.”
The question of how much the most vulnerable countries stand to gain from the Paris agreement depends on, among other things, whether you’re willing to overlook short-term realities and trust the agreement’s long-term potential. The science shows that many island nations and drought-stressed L.D.C.s will suffer or perish if warming goes beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius, and that the individual targets set by the hundred and ninety-five signatory nations blow past that, collectively achieving emissions reductions that would lead to warming beyond three degrees. With this in mind, Uludong and her fellow L.D.C. negotiators fought tooth and nail for a goal to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, along with language that requires signatories to ratchet up their targets every five years to achieve that goal. Uludong told me that she and her colleagues “understand, of course, that some of the achievements of the agreement—including the 1.5 degrees—are, at this point, more symbolic than they are real. But, for now, that’s enough.”
One of the most important features of the agreement, from the standpoint of vulnerable nations, is its emphasis on adaptation rather than mitigation—the latter being irrelevant to countries that emit very little CO2 but already incur flooding, drought, and other symptoms of warming. “Right now, something like eighty per cent of the world’s climate finance goes to mitigation,” Andrew Deutz, the director of international government relations for the Nature Conservancy and a collaborator with several L.D.C. and island-nation delegations, told me. “The language in the agreement is designed to redirect significant portions of that funding toward adaptation.” Shiferaw Teklemariam, Ethiopia’s Minister of Federal Affairs, said that, for a country like his, adaptation funds might be spent on irrigation and drought management, diversification of agricultural practices, a more resilient livestock sector, better saving and lending mechanisms for farmers, and better forest-conservation practices—strategies that will also help manage risk in Ethiopia’s fast-growing economy and attract foreign investment. But for an island nation, adaptation is a more complicated proposition. “We’re talking about enlarging and elevating islands by transporting soil from some other place, about replacing mangroves and restoring corals and fishing grounds affected by ocean acidity,” Francois Martel, a member of the Fiji delegation, said. “That could get astronomically expensive.”
Which is why the negotiators for the United States weren’t prepared to accept specific references in the agreement to liability or compensation for damages under international law—“because that would have been a deal killer when they brought this back home to Congress,” Deutz said. For the same reason, the negotiators argued to move language stipulating a hundred-billion-dollar annual fund for climate aid out of the binding part of the deal. Instead, the agreement states only that a new target for international climate aid, with a floor of a hundred billion dollars per year, must be defined by 2025.
But 2025 is a long way off for a country like Bangladesh, which is already experiencing the impacts of climate change. “During the recent monsoon season, about four thousand people per day had be relocated to urban slums, because the costal belt was so flooded—these are real and present dangers for us,” Munir Muniruzzaman, the chairman of the Global Military Advisory Council on Climate Change and a former major general in the Bangladesh Army, told me. “The Paris agreement is bold and ambitious, but it leaves me with grave concerns about how the funding is going to be fulfilled, administered, and utilized in the near term. That needs to be cleared up quickly.” Enele Sopoaga, the Prime Minister of Tuvalu, echoed the need for more clarity and certainty on climate aid. “Seventy-five per cent of the people of my country have already said that, if nothing is done immediately and urgently, we are leaving Tuvalu,” he told me.
Many of the L.D.C. and island-nation leaders and advisers whom I spoke with were nevertheless hopeful. “I’ve been to eleven COPs, and this was a completely different dynamic between the developed and the developing countries,” Uludong said. Deutz noted that the High Ambition Coalition, which was spearheaded by the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands and eventually garnered support from a hundred and forty countries, was an unprecedented diplomatic feat. “It suddenly became the club that everyone wanted to join,” he said. “Nobody wanted to be the spoiler, and that ended up being a huge advantage for vulnerable nations in the negotiations.” By contrast, six years ago, in Copenhagen, a bloc of developing nations bolted angrily from the negotiations, protesting what they felt were strategies intended only to protect the interests of rich countries.
Uludong noted that President Obama established a tone of simpatico early on in the conference, when he called himself an “island boy,” referring to his childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia, and insisted that the voices of small island nations and L.D.C.s in the negotiations be heard. French leaders, she added, also went to great lengths to pursue a no-country-left-behind strategy. A new diplomatic precedent had been established. “In Paris, we achieved what I think of as yellow-bus diplomacy,” she said. “Envision one of those yellow buses in India where you have people hanging out of the windows—that’s how I see this agreement. Maybe the G20 are sitting on the seats, but the rest of us are there, holding onto the sides and the back.” Implicit in this approach, she added, is an important recognition by polluting countries: “If we save the vulnerable, the rest of the world will be saved, too.”