Information, Please! The Knowledge Crux at Copenhagen

Authors

• Ryan Schuchard

  Former Associate Director, Climate Change, BSR

I spent half of my first day at COP15 in line, mostly outside, in the cold. But I was one of the lucky ones to eventually emerge inside the Bella convention center. Others waited for six hours or more only to be turned away at the door (if they even made it that far).

I don’t know whether I’ll make it back in on Friday, when I’m scheduled to present at the China Climate Registry panel. Word has it that the 15,000-person occupancy for the 35,000-plus who are registered will shrink by the day until virtually no one but government delegates is allowed in at the end of the week. We’re all bewildered. After all, we’re all on the invite list.

The problem is information. We could have used some pretty simple advice about what to expect as we planned our meetings at the event.

It occurs to me that information (in particular, the dearth of information) has become something of a theme with the climate negotiations.

On one hand, there is “Climategate.” In this case, U.S. policy crafters have been forced to defend themselves as news pundits and others have taken snatches stolen from private emails among scientists to put science itself on trial in the court of public opinion. In reality, nothing has yet come to light that implicates climate science in any fundamental way. Nonetheless, the fact that climate experts spent valuable political time and energy defending the validity of this information points to a continued gap between scientists and the public on opinions about climate science.

The issue of information—or rather how information is verified—is also one of the chief sticking points governing whether China will sign on to a climate treaty. The country is reticent to have outsiders monitor and verify its greenhouse gas emissions, yet assurance of climate effectiveness is needed globally. This need for robust auditing highlights a challenge that is especially thorny when done across cultures like China and the United States.

Business managers who live or die based on the effectiveness of global communication might think these problems are easily solved. A message to you: Your help is needed. Without business helping to communicate the best available information we have about climate science and showing the way for solutions that work on the ground in countries like China, climate policy will be slow in coming, and we may not achieve results that effectively unleash investment capital. And without such results, real progress on climate change is unlikely.