POINT OF VIEW/ Norichika Kanie: Japan needs a strategy for climate change talks

The administration of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama garnered international praise for steering Japan toward a leadership position with its September announcement of a 25-percent reduction target for greenhouse gas emissions.

But Japan has failed to live up to the expectations placed on it during negotiations in working group meetings of the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change since the September announcement. That is probably because the Hatoyama administration has not yet fully realized that the climate change issue has become a key part of international politics.

As I see it, the international order in the 21st century will be based on measures to cope with climate change. This explains the jockeying by countries and regions for a leadership position on this issue in recent years.

Nobel Prize-winning U.S. President Barack Obama's proposal for "a world without nuclear weapons" has also increased the importance of nonmilitary issues. Responses to these issues require a shift away from the conventional concept of an international order that revolves around military might.

The primary cause of climate change is the excessive use of fossil fuels as a source of energy. As a result, our responses to the problem will determine the direction of policies on the use of energy and natural resources, which are traditionally critical topics in international politics.

Until now, the question of how to secure "inputs"--stable supplies of energy resources such as oil, coal and natural gas--has determined a country's energy security policy. This has constituted a major part of the balance of power among nations. But now it has became clear that the problem of "outputs," or emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) as a result of energy consumption, is causing an enormous negative impact on our planet.

From another perspective, the problem of outputs has become a constraint on the use of inputs. This recognition is the starting point for climate change countermeasures. Nations which can secure as-yet unexploited resources like renewable energy and low-carbon resources on the input side will be able to steer the international political scene in the generation ahead.

Competition for leadership

Another major departure from the past is that instead of using military power to control the territory of another country, domestic policies--such as those that nurture and promote environmental technologies--will be strongly linked to international politics. This is because new technologies for the utilization of new energy sources and saving energy consumption will be needed globally and for a long time into the future.

Leading other countries in the development of technologies and designing of international institutional architectures to promote diffusion and transfer of low-carbon technologies will be directly connected to securing economic profit and markets in developing countries.

One could say that the negotiations at the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen are the first step to determine such an international system.

In addition to ministers in charge of the environment, the state heads from about 110 European and other countries, including Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy as well as Hatoyama, are expected to participate in the conference.

South Korea, with its status straddling developed and developing country, is beginning to take on the stance of a middle power, which until now was claimed by the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries. Seoul aims to exert leadership as a "bridge-builder" in multilateral negotiations. Among emerging nations, Indonesia has taken the lead by establishing midterm emissions targets, even before China and India have done so, and begun to adopt a leadership role among developing countries.

The United States, which rejected the Kyoto Protocol, had until recently showed a reluctance to take measures on climate change. But under the Obama's leadership, it has made rapid-fire proposals at U.N. working group sessions, suddenly setting the pace at those meetings.

The United States has made proposals with regard to how to measure emissions reduction efforts, report the results, evaluate methodologies for verification and match funds provided by developed nations with funding requests from developing countries. Even though the level of ambition of the United States is still very low in terms of the numerical targets it announced, its influence dominated the meeting rooms with technological topics. At the center of all this was Jonathan Pershing, who served as chief negotiator for the United States at the COP3 held in Kyoto in 1997, a person who is well versed in everything about climate change. Politically appointed by the Obama administration, he is waging a tough negotiation strategy based on scientific knowledge.

Challenge for Japan

Meanwhile, Japan impressed the international community with its 25-percent reduction target, but the challenge now is whether it can blaze a trail in the diplomatic arena, taking advantage of its climate change countermeasures. If Japan is going to declare high numerical targets and urge other countries to seek similar targets, it must demonstrate a reasonable basis for its calculations.

The issue is what criteria Japan will use to calculate numerical targets and yet maintain balance (i.e., equity) with other countries. In Japan, the business community in particular has argued about the issue of equity and fairness in terms of costs because Japanese industries, whose energy conservation technologies are already regarded as among the best in the world, will have to shoulder higher costs to reduce emissions further. Therefore, the business community tends to support the basis of calculations for reduction targets that are too lax for Japan.

In international negotiations, however, that stance will not convince other nations. The debates focus not on the costs but the responsibility of developed countries, which have brought about climate change by their continuous emissions of CO2. The focus is also on developed nations' capacity, or financial and economic power.

Japan cannot compete without a strategy that covers these aspects. Without such a strategy, Japan could see a repetition of the negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol, which was regarded by some economic sectors as "an unfair agreement that imposed numerical targets one-sidedly" on countries like Japan. This, they complained, was a result of negotiations being taken up with political maneuvering without sound scientific basis.

In 2007, the Japanese government hammered out a sectoral approach by adding up the possible emissions reductions by sector--industry, transport, households and so on--to formulate national emissions reduction targets. At that time, the Japanese government used this method only for domestic debate and did not bring it to the table of international negotiations with indications of possible emissions reduction amounts for other countries. Aside from the legitimacy of this approach, had Japan been quicker to propose this initiative to other governments and refined it politically, the course of debate may have turned out differently.

The first step to exert leadership on the climate change issue would probably be to suggest politically-acceptable national targets based on reasonable criteria, taking international consensus into account. Conflicting interests of many related government ministries and agencies tend to bury expert opinions in the quagmire of domestic negotiation processes. In order to break out of such a situation, Japan should consider making political appointments of experts as head negotiators, just as the United States has done.

The Hatoyama government should show political leadership.

In Europe, there is a growing recognition that the real negotiations will begin after the COP15 winds up. If the Hatoyama administration is serious about leading the move to rebuild the international order, it will have to make climate change a critical part of its foreign policy and engage in earnest negotiations based on a long-term strategy. If it responds passively to international trends as its predecessors did, Japan's influence will inevitably fade.

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The author is a Tokyo Institute of Technology associate professor specializing in political science and international relations. He is an expert member of Japan's Central Environment Council of the Environment Ministry. Since 2009 he has been a visiting scholar at Sciences Po in Paris.(IHT/Asahi: December 16,2009)