Copenhagen:
failure or stepping stone?
Now the dust has settled after the Copenhagen climate summit, we can assess the fallout, and what the next steps should be towards a meaningful climate deal.
First of all, let’s look at the positives from Copenhagen. Not a very long list...
1. Just about all the major world leaders turned up.
2. They accepted scientific consensus that global warming must stay below 2°C.
3. It was agreed poorer countries need financial help to cope with climate change.
But that’s about it. There was no legally binding deal, no detailed targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions and no agreed timetable for future action. The 2° limit wasn’t even set against any historical benchmark – for instance against pre-industrial temperatures. But then again, it's a start…
So what’s the ‘Copenhagen Accord’?
The Accord was a pretty weak political statement, negotiated by only a few (albeit significant) countries – like the US, China and India – which invites nations to voluntarily record their own targets for reducing emissions.
The Accord also requires rich countries to provide financial support to help poorer countries grow as clean, low-carbon economies and cope with the impacts of climate change. But as it stands, financial commitments can’t be legally enforced – and it’s not clear if the substantial sums mentioned ($30 billion by 2012 rising to $100 billion a year by 2020) are new money or from existing aid budgets.
The Accord won’t address climate change in itself – it doesn’t move far enough or fast enough. But it could, if followed up and built on, be a stepping stone towards the fair, ambitious and binding climate deal the world needs.
Getting from Copenhagen to a real deal
What happens now? To be honest, not everyone’s next steps are clear, but here’s our own view:
• all countries must announce ambitious emissions cuts, and explain how these will help the world stay below the 2° warming limit
• financial help for developing countries has to be introduced urgently
• there must be a 2010 timetable for the UN process, with deadlines for agreeing key issues, so there can be a proper binding deal at the next big climate summit in Mexico at the end of the year.
No time for delay
A less-reported but important outcome of Copenhagen was the decision to keep using the existing draft negotiating texts from 2009, which contain most of the options needed to create an effective agreement. So that’s promising.
But there’s no time for delay. Every year the world postpones action, climate change will take a greater human, ecological and economic toll.
Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Climate Change Convention (UNFCCC), has admitted that the lack of a full agreement at Copenhagen “only makes the task more urgent.” He also said: “Although Copenhagen didn’t produce the final cake, it left countries with the right ingredients to bake a new one in Mexico.”
That may be so, but there’s one other vital ingredient – political will. Without it, the ‘cake’ is unlikely to be to the taste of those people and species already affected by climate change – and it could fall completely flat.
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