COP 15: What is the Impact on Malaysia and South East Asia?

By Daniel Chandranayagam

What most can take away from COP 15 is a bitter sense of disappointment with the ‘disagree-to-agree’ outcome of the summit, which has been described as “a theater of the absurd” on HuffPost. With that in mind, it piqued my interest to learn that a talk would be presented by the US Embassy Public Affairs Office, at the Annexe Gallery, on the Copenhagen Summit.

The speaker, Dr Myron Shekelle, is conservation biologist and director of Tarsier.org, who has spent some time in the forests of Sulawesi studying tarsiers in their natural habitat. Along the course of his research, he has been exposed to the rich and natural biodiversity, not only in Indonesia, but also in the Philippines and the rest of South East Asia.

Dr Shekelle stressed emphatically at the outset that what he was about to say was his opinion only, and was not endorsed by the US government or policy-makers. Therefore, he stated, his presentation was not going to be riddled with propaganda or any hidden agenda.

Beginning with his background and his work with tarsiers, a cute primate found only in South East Asia, Shekelle found that biodiversity loss is far more serious an issue than other environmental issues, including climate change, global warming, carbon emissions and ozone depletion, among others. He also discovered that conservation of forests in South East Asia does not have a blanket solution – “not all forests can be conserved in the same way”.

He stated that, if done correctly, biodiversity loss and global warming can be solved together at the same time, if done correctly and carefully. The two courses of action he put forward were to either mitigate or to adapt.

This led Shekelle to COP 15, its background, and the outcome of the recent summit. Shekelle quoted the People Republic of China’s (PRC) reaction to the Copenhagen Accord, that it was a positive move forward. Here, Shekelle pointed out that the PRC and the USA have long disagreed on many things, but since they both agreed on this one thing, the implication was that the Accord must be a good thing.

Shekelle continued on about the UN-REDD Programme and about “aid” to countries who sought to conserve their rich, diverse and ancient rainforests. He said, in a nutshell, that he believed that each nation has a right to do what it wanted to do with its natural resources, but it was his job to provide scientific evidence so that the state in question might make an informed decision. If the state in question chose not to destroy its rainforests and sought aid, that would be a good thing.

However, if the state in question sought aid from the West, then it would have to consider its ‘customer’. Shekelle drew a commercial analogy, stating that the customer’s needs and desires need to be known in order to get a sale (so to speak). Shekelle said, “If we want foreign sponsored projects, we must practise good business sense.”

Considering that Shekelle purportedly did not have an agenda, it was difficult to understand the purpose of his statement. It was also hard to understand how Shekelle, a scientist by profession, and not from any governmental body, would be in a position to give advise on how to get funding from the West, especially from the viewpoint of a South East Asian body. In fact, the public affairs officer from the US Embassy later pointed out that Malaysia is not eligible for the REDD Programme because it was meant for really poor countries.

He mentioned that his observation was that there was abject poor (one assumes in Indonesia, but this was not clear) but it was the richer of the poor who abused the natural resources and others who were more poor.

The scientist is of the view that the West has no obligation, moral or otherwise, to help countries seeking to conserve their rainforests, hence his market analogy for aid application (for a more compelling counter argument to this, read William S Becker’s “COP 15: Accepting Responsibility” Huffington Post, 14/12/2009).

Of course, developing nations are not of this view. While most Malaysians care about their forests, the state and policy-makers are usually all for development. In the meantime, governments and policy-makers of developed nations understand the need to conserve the world’s forests and biodiversity, but, from this talk at least, the impression is that they are unwilling to take any action. By action, I mean actually joining forces with civil society and nonprofits in the areas concerned, getting down and dirty and doing the work.

The impression Shekelle gave was: “You want the money? You give us everything we want, and we’ll think about it…”

Shekelle, as mentioned earlier, felt that large blanket solutions were far from possible, as forest region had a separate and sometimes differing issues. This leads me to wonder how much money it would take for an organisation or the state to give the ‘customer’ what it wants. Imagine, having to put together a comprehensive, transparent report for each region on the remote and sometimes unexplored jungles of Borneo, Sulawesi and the rest of South East Asia, to make an application for aid.

Finally, Shekelle ominously showed a slide on the so-called “Climategate Conspiracy“, using it as a warning (in a manner of speaking) about how difficult it is to get aid, especially as there are these theories floating around.

Throughout the talk, I kept on wondering what was its purpose. We know about climate change, forest depletion and the destruction of biodiversity. We also know that Cop 15 did not reach its desired outcome and instead we got the Copenhagen Accord. Furthermore, most nonprofits in Malaysia know that transparency is required in the specific manner outlined by funders. There didn’t seem to be any specific reason why the talk was given, if we talk Shekelle’s assurance that there was no hidden agenda behind his independent opinion during the talk.

Keeping this in mind, what was surprising was how the US Embassy’s public affairs officer, in a response to a question from a World Affairs student, said how Barack Obama came from a background of wanting to help communities, and now he “wants to organise the world!”

It’s just as well that there was no hidden agenda or political propaganda during the talk.

Daniel Chandranayagam is the Chief Editor of the CSR Digest.

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