According to those who have endured previous summits, Friday was run of the mill at the Copenhagen Climate Conference: a stream of breaking news, journalists running here and there, plenty of rumours, and the inevitable last minute deals. The outcome was the announcement in the early hours of Saturday morning that the plenary hall had approved an agreement that was not only lacking in content but also non-binding. Disappointment among delegates and observers alike was widespread.
During his stay in Copenhagen, the US president, Barack Obama, worked closely and often behind closed doors with the leaders of the main emerging economies. By mid-afternoon Friday, he had convinced China, India, South Africa and Brazil to sign an agreement that would enable all who had spent the previous two weeks in deep negotiations to save face. The agreement was accepted by the EU, primarily because it did not appear likely that anything more could be done. In contrast, Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Sudan refused to sign off the agreement, which could hinder its subsequent application.
In the end, the Copenhagen Accord as it has been named, does not include any specific figures on emissions, although the signatories have committed to publishing their objectives before 1 February 2010. Point four of an agreement that only covers two and a half pages, states that these objectives must be more ambitious than those fixed in the Kyoto Protocol.
“Delivery of reductions and financing by developed countries will be measured, reported and verified in accordance with existing and any further guidelines adopted by the Conference of the Parties, and will ensure that accounting of such targets and finance is rigorous, robust and transparent”. We will therefore have to wait and see whether or not the pressure applied on China to allow international observers to audit its emissions will come to anything.
On the financing front, a $30 billion fund has been established for climate change adaptation and mitigation for developing countries, plus a $100 billion long-term fund by 2020.
Signatories have also committed to evaluate the Accord in 2015, a year after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issues its report in 2014.
“It's not what we expected," Braz’s senior climate negotiator, Sergio Barbosa Serra, said. "It may still be a way of salvaging something and paving the way for another a meeting or series of meetings next year”. However, Sudan's Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, the Sudanese chair of the Group of 77, is less optimistic. He believes that it is not what was expected from Copenhagen – “it is merely a political statement” – and has declared that negotiations should be extended a further six months to reach a real agreement.
Europe, unsatisfied
It appears that Europe has had to reluctantly accept this watered down agreement, while the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, had to satisfy himself with reiterating that the EU will still cut greenhouse gas emissions by 30% by 2020 and 80% by 2050. Sarkozy considers that the Copenhagen Accord “is not perfect” and has stressed that both the EU and the US would have preferred a binding agreement.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was also downbeat: "It may not be everything we hoped for”, he said according to the BBC, “but this decision of the Conference of Parties is an essential beginning... We must transform this into a legally binding treaty next year," he said according to BBC. Whether or not this will happen in Mexico in 2010, which is where the next climate change conference will take place, is still unclear, especially as China and India are both against it.
Greenpeace graphically demonstrated its total rejection of the Accord. “"The city of Copenhagen is a climate crime scene tonight, with the guilty men and women [referring to Obama and Clinton and their entourage] fleeing to the airport in shame. World leaders had a once in a generation chance to change the world for good, to avert catastrophic climate change. In the end they produced a poor deal full of loopholes big enough to fly Air Force One through,” it said in a press release on Saturday. Another environment organization, Amigos de la Tierra, also called the conference “a disaster for the poorest in the world"; while Mar Asunción from WWF Spain, described the Accord as "insufficient" and said that a binding agreement on emissions must be reached in Mexico.
Meanwhile, Juantxo López de Uralde, director of Greenpeace Spain, will have plenty of time to contemplate the last fortnight's events and consider what the future holds for Planet Earth after being remanded in custody for gate crashing a royal gala dinner for heads of state at the UN climate summit on Thursday. He faces up to three years in jail.
To download the full text of the Accord, click here:
