She has staked her political future on victory in the fray. The opening political skirmish, and plummeting polls, don’t augur well for her success but there is still a long way to go before the war is won or lost.

In Australia, as in other developed country high carbon emitters, like Canada and the United States, a major rallying cry against action on climate change is the folly of moving first. That, the argument runs, imposes penalties on competitive carbon-emitting sectors in first-movers and makes a negligible contribution to alleviating climate change without the action by others that can only be reliably secured under a binding global agreement. This is a problem for which the prisoner’s dilemma has real bite.

It is possible that there will be a long transitional period before there is a comprehensive binding international agreement. But is it really the case that countries like Australia have to go it alone, should its government succeed in the move to introduce a carbon price and emissions trading scheme? Is the carbon emissions regime the empty set that those who caution against national initiative without the reassurance of global action would have us believe?

Australia’s climate change adviser, Ross Garnaut points out, in our lead essay this week, that the much maligned Copenhagen meeting in fact delivered a new framework for international cooperation on mitigation that ‘took account of the new global power realities and strengthened constraints on global emissions. It also kept alive the possibility of effective mitigation to achieve strong emissions reduction objectives. This is a much under-rated achievement … to which Australia contributed significantly — particularly through its proposal for a transparent mechanism to capture contributions by all participating countries’.

‘The Cancun Agreements reinforced the achievements of Copenhagen and marked a new beginning for international climate change efforts and provided building blocks toward comprehensive international agreement that brought together mitigation commitments and actions by developed and developing countries alike. Success at Cancun owed much to deft Mexican diplomacy as well as the hard-won gains struck in Copenhagen.’

It will take time for the full implications of the change in the international regime to emerge, but what is clear is that there has been a decisive shift to a bottom-up approach to mitigation. To date, 85 developed and developing countries representing over 80 per cent of global emissions and about 90 per cent of the global economy have pledged targets and actions under the now-anchored Copenhagen Accord.

With strong commitments from China and other large developing countries, the sum of commitments by developing countries to the end of 2012 exceeds those of developed countries alone. While these commitments fall short of what’s needed to meet an objective of holding temperature increases to around 2°C, they represent a substantial achievement that should undermine the advocacy of doing nothing, and encourage countries like Australia to join in and thereby help to shift the game.

Both China and the United States have accepted commitments under the new arrangements that would have been impossible under a binding regime, such as the Kyoto Protocol, which exempted developing countries from early action. Higher ambition was achieved where binding commitments may have led to greater caution.

As Garnaut points out, the current framework contains gaps. It is not clear how the shift toward the kind of binding commitments that will provide the basis for deep international trade in emissions entitlements will emerge. One possibility is that groups of countries, most likely neighbours in a region, could replicate many of the advantages of deep multilateral trade within regional trading systems. This would reduce costs of mitigation and encourage greater ambition in participating countries.

In the Asia Pacific region, a number of potential partners can be readily identified. Setting aside the United States and China, which at this stage seem more likely to pursue their own agenda, countries in the Asia Pacific that have pledged emissions targets under the Copenhagen Accord include Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand. It would be logical for these and other countries to explore the options for regional climate policy alliances.

The corollary to persuading national electorates to get behind carbon pricing and addressing the global emissions problem is active regional diplomacy that reinforces moves to the same effect among neighbours in Asia.

And the tragedy in Sendai…

Everyone’s hearts go out for the thousands affected by the devastating earthquake and tsunami off Sendai last Friday. It is difficult to get one’s mind around the enormity of what has happened to our friends in Japan.

At magnitude 8.9, the Sendai quake was 178 times bigger than that in Kobe in 1995. The 10-metre tsunami wreaked its independent, terrifying destruction. Trains, trucks, cars, boats, buildings and infrastructure were all swept away. It would be a miracle if the death toll is lower than Kobe’s when over 6,000 people perished. This was not the Tokyo ‘big one.’ But Tokyo also withstood a major buffeting  although it is already back in business.

Calculation of the economic costs seems a heartless task to have to perform at this time but like the forensic scientist, dissection of the effects of this event on the body economic and politic are an important part of working out hope to cope and help that nation that survive.

In a special essay this week, I suggest that, if the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima is contained, the economic costs of Sendai are unlikely to match those of the Kobe quake, which was the most costly such tragedy for which we have historical records. But it is early days and difficult to make final assessments yet.

What is clear is that the resilience and capacity of the Japanese people — not only their remarkable capacity to face natural calamity stoically but their human capital, skills and organisational know-how — are aspects of Japanese nation that are now on full display as the Japanese people bring them to bear on dealing with this huge disaster.