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Copenhagen: Deal or No Deal?

Dec 20, 2009 Editorial

After twelve years of preparation – with the last two years witnessing continuous negotiation – the world still does not have a binding treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol on addressing climate change.
In the end the representatives of 193 nations(including some 115 leaders) gathered in Copenhagen witnessed a good old-fashioned political “deal” by the global heavyweights – US and China (India, and South Africa just happened to be in the room) that let both of them do pretty much what they were going to do in any case.
The Plenary Session, which could only approve the deal struck the heavyweights unanimously, was bitterly divided. Not surprisingly, it was bogged down for hours by protests from delegates who felt they were excluded from the process or said the deal didn’t go far enough in cutting the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. Delegates from Cuba, Sudan and Venezuela denounced the process and the result.
To resolve the stalemate, however, early on Saturday, U.N. officials changed the way the text was presented to the plenary. The conference “recognized” the agreement and those who agreed with it were invited to sign it. After a break from the tumultuous debate, the conference president gavelled a decision to “take note” of the agreement instead of formally approving it.
Robert Orr, the U.N. policy coordination chief, then announced that the conference’s decision to “take note” of the U.S.-led accord, provides it with “equal legal validity as ‘accepted.’” Some experts said that this clears the way for the accord to begin even though it was not formally approved by the conference. Such is the way of democracy.
While most other developed countries, not surprisingly, followed Obama’s lead German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a leading proponent of strong action to confront global warming, gave the Copenhagen Accord only grudging acceptance, saying she had “mixed feelings” about the outcome and called it only a first step.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also chose to be pragmatic: “We have a deal in Copenhagen,” he said, adding “this is just the beginning” of a process to craft a binding pact to reduce emissions. So what was agreed to in this “non-binding” accord? For our LCDS as we had predicted, the news was not too bleak. REDD and REDD + were about the most non-contentious item on the agenda in Copenhagen. On deforestation, the accord stipulated that there should be the “immediate establishment of a mechanism including REDD-plus” to mobilise capital from developed countries for “reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation” and enhancing “removals of greenhouse gas emission by forests”.
A new UNFCCC mechanism called the Copenhagen Climate Fund will be established to support funded “projects, programmes, policies” on mitigation, REDD-plus, adaptation, capacity building, technology development and transfer. Carbon markets, on which so much of our hopes for financing our LCDS were also mentioned.
In an annex, there will also be US$30 billion made available over the three-year period 2010 to 2012 inclusive, balanced between climate change adaptation and emissions mitigation. US$25 billion was already committed by the EU, the US and Japan. In addition, developed countries are to “support a goal of mobilizing jointly 100 billion dollars a year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries. This funding will come from a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources of finance.
On global targets re-emissions, there was an agreement to limit “increase in global temperature below two degrees C”. Annex 1 or developed countries would “commit to reducing their emissions individually or jointly by at least 80 per cent by 2050”and to implement individual or joint quantified targets for emissions reduction by 2020, to both 1990 and 2005 base years. There are no obligations on developing countries to make cuts.

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