PARIS: Yvo de Boer, it could be
argued, holds the fate of the planet in his hands.
The United
Nation's climate majordomo -- tasked with herding 192 nations toward a do-or-die
deal by year's end -- does not have the power to impose an agreement on how to
curb greenhouse gases and cope with its consequences.
But if he
fails in his role as executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on
Climate Change (UNFCCC), it just might muck the whole thing up.
This
week, de Boer is in Bonn, Germany coaxing the troubled and hugely complex talks
along ahead of the December deadline for a new treaty.
The road to
Copenhagen, where the final round of talks is set to take place, is strewn with
minefields, and part of his job is to help negotiators sidestep and defuse them.
So how did a Dutch public housing bureaucrat wind up at the
epicentre of the fight to slow global warming?
"I had a policy in my
life up to then to try something completely different every three or four
years," de Boer said of his decision in 1994 to apply for a job within the Dutch
environment ministry to head the climate change department.
"To my
great amazement, I got the job. I knew nothing about climate change, absolutely
nothing," he said in an interview.
In the mid-1990s, global warming
was only beginning to register on the Richter scale of international concerns,
and de Boer's was mainly interested in how efforts to cut carbon pollution might
intersect with development goals.
Having spent his youth traipsing
across what was then known as the "Third World" with his diplomat father, de
Boer, born in 1954, had seen the ravages of deep, systemic poverty up close.
Today, more than three years after then UN chief Kofi Annan tapped
him to head up the United Nation's climate initiative, he has not lost sight of
those priorities.
"What is sometimes forgotten is that a large part
of this process is about how 145 very poor countries are going to adapt to the
impact of climate change and be helped to grow their economies in a cleaner
way," he said.
For de Boer, issuing such reminders is also part of
his brief, and consistent with the UN Convention.
For some
diplomats, however, it is evidence that he has overstepped his role as a neutral
facilitator.
"Yvo often defends developing countries, sometimes with
strong statements insisting that the northern hemisphere has to pay up," said
one veteran negotiator from a rich nation.
"That shows a certain
courage. But sometimes he goes too far and becomes political, saying things that
exceed his mandate."
De Boer has also been accused of pushing the
agenda of the European Union, which has taken the lead on reducing CO2 output by
promising to slash emissions by 20 percent compared to 1900 levels by 2020, and
by 30 percent if other industrialised countries follow suit.
"He has
no business saying whether a given proposal is acceptable or not. Sometimes Mr.
de Boer forgets he is an office holder, not a party to the talks," said another
Western negotiator, who asked not to be named.
De Boer is aware of
such criticism, but insists he strives to remain neutral.
"I know
that people complain about that. I try to make a distinction between the
Secretariat -- which is, and should be, neutral -- and my own personal role. So
if you don't like it, shoot at me, don't shoot at the Secretariat," he said.
Speaking in a British-inflected baritone, de Boer measures his words
carefully and is rarely caught off guard.
"He lacks charisma,"
sniped one minister from an industrialised nation.
And yet, de Boer
will likely be remembered for a moment of high drama that reduced him to tears
in front of thousands of delegates at the December 2007 climate conference in
Bali, Indonesia.
Days of around-the-clock negotiations had produced
a key draft agreement. But the US administration of George W. Bush refused to
sign on.
In the meantime, the Chinese delegation -- under the
mistaken impression that back-channel discussions had been opened -- blasted de
Boer in a full plenary session.
"Nobody had slept that night. I
hadn't slept much the night before, or the night before that. People were tense
and tired, and the stakes were high," he recalled. "That confrontation was a
very bad moment for me."
De Boer cracked under the strain and left
the auditorium, to huge applause.
But within an hour he was back, in
time to see the United States reverse itself and seal the deal.
When
not behind a microphone, much of de Boer's time is taken up with the logistics
of organising hundreds of international meetings every year, small and large.
The December gatherings include some 15,000 participants.
"Communications, security, logistics, electronics, meeting rooms,
signs, documents in multiple languages, shuttle buses, hotel rooms -- it's like
organising a Rolling Stones concert four times a year," he said.
De
Boer has been compared to a symphony conductor trying to get musicians to read
off the same page, and a referee trying to make sure all the players stick to
the rule and avoid fouls.
But de Boer sees it differently.
"In my first meeting with staff when I joined the Secretariat, I
described my role as that of the butler," he recalled.
"The butler's
role is to make sure that the household is well run and that the family are in a
position to make sensible decisions. But it is not the responsibility of the
butler to take decisions himself."