news20091220gdn1

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Copenhagen Climate change conference 2009]
Copenhagen: The last-ditch drama that saved the deal from collapse
In the end it came down to frantic horse trading between exhausted politicians. After two weeks of high politics and low cunning that pitted world leaders against each other and threw up extraordinary new alliances between states, agreement was finally reached yesterday on an accord to tackle global warming. But the bitterness and recriminations that bedevilled the talks threaten to spread as environmental activists and scientists react to what many see as a deeply flawed deal
John Vidal and Jonathan Watts
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 20 December 2009 00.05 GMT Article history

The Copenhagen accord was gavelled through in the early hours of yesterday morning after a night of extraordinary drama and two weeks of subterfuge. It is a document that will shape the world, the climate and the balance of power for decades to come, but the story of how it came into existence is one of high drama and low politics.

Amid leaks, suspicion, recriminations and exhaustion, the world's leaders abandoned ordinary negotiating protocol to haggle line-for-line with mid-level officials. An emergency meeting of 30 leaders was called after a royal banquet on Thursday evening because of the huge number of disputes still remaining.

China and India were desperate to avoid this last-minute attempt to strong-arm them into a deal. The Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh's plane mysteriously developed a problem that delayed his arrival. Chinese premier Wen Jiabao simply refused to attend, sending his officials instead. In a collapse of protocol, middle-ranking officials from the two countries negotiated line by line on a text with Nicolas Sarkozy of France, Germany's Angela Merkel and US secretary of state Hillary Clinton. Gordon Brown felt the only way to overcome the logjam was for leaders to descend into the detail and take on officials. Yet there was still no agreement by 7am on Friday.

"I thought it was meltdown," said Ed Miliband, Britain's secretary of state for energy and climate change. Brown returned to the fray, cranking out 13 amendments designed to overcome the objections of the developing nations and press home Europe's desire to commit to a 50% reduction in global emissions by 2050 and a determination to make the process legally – not just "politically" – binding on all parties. Both goals were rejected by China and India, which had formed a strong alliance.

During the day, and the flurry of different texts, the leaders battled on, trying to reach an agreement that was not just about saving the Earth from global warming, but would also play an important role in reshaping the global balance of power. Barack Obama, who had flown in on Friday morning on Air Force One, joined the discussions immediately and held two sets of direct talks with Wen, who never once participated in the closed-room group meetings.

Around 8pm, after the second of these bilateral meetings, Obama returned to the negotiating room saying he had secured an agreement from Wen on the key issue of how promises to cut emissions would be verified by the international community. But a new fight then erupted in which China bizarrely insisted that Europe lower its targets for greenhouse gas emissions.

Merkel wanted to set a target for developed nations to cut emissions by 80% by 2050, but in the last gasp, China declared this unacceptable. This astonished many of those present: China was telling rich nations to rein back on their long-term commitment. The assumed reason was that China will have joined their ranks by 2050 and does not want to meet such a target. "Ridiculous," exclaimed Merkel as she was forced to abandon the target.

But it was not to be the final battle in a bruising conflict that left the negotiators drained and the draft diluted. The final text was released shortly before midnight. The final two-and-a-half-page political agreement – the Copenhagen accord – was vaguely worded, short on detail and not legally binding. Although it was hailed as a step forward by Brown and Obama, the weak content and the final huddled process of decision-making – ignoring the majority of the 192 nations present – provoked disappointment and fury.

Part of the frustration was the lack of new ambition. Due to the leaks, hold-ups and suspicion, China barely budged and the EU refused to raise it sights. Before the Copenhagen conference, the EU said it was willing to raise its emissions reduction target from 20% to 30% by 2020 if other countries also lifted theirs. That never happened. European commission president José Manuel Barroso said not one country asked the EU to move up to the higher figure, but counterparts had pulled down EU proposals to set a target for 2050.

"It was extraordinary," he said. "This is important for the record. Other parties do not have the interest and awareness in climate change that we have." Which other party was soon apparent. That night, immediately after the accord was announced and denounced for its weakness, the Observer asked the director general of the Swedish environment protection agency, Lars-Erik Liljelund, who was to blame for blocking a 2050 target for cutting emissions.

"China," he said after a dramatic pause. "China doesn't like numbers."

The drama was not over. Without recognition by the plenary session of all the delegate nations, the agreement was almost worthless. But the anger in the hall meant that approval was far from certain. When the Danish chairman, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, gave delegates just an hour to consider the accord, he was assailed by a storm of criticism.

The Venezuelan representative raised a bloodied hand to grab his attention. "Do I have to bleed to grab your attention," she fumed. "International agreements cannot be imposed by a small exclusive group. You are endorsing a coup d'état against the United Nations."

While the debate raged, China's delegate, Su Wei, was silent as Latin American nations and small island states lined up to attack the accord and the way it had been reached.

"We're offended by the methodology. This has been done in the dark," fumed the Bolivian delegate. "It does not respect two years of work."

Others resorted to histrionics. The document "is a solution based on the same very values, in our opinion, that channelled six million people in Europe into furnaces," said Sudan's Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping.

It was too much for Rasmussen, who looked strained and exhausted after a week spent vainly trying to bridge the schisms between the parties. He raised his gavel to close the debate, which would have aborted the Copenhagen accord and condemned the summit to abject failure.

The document was saved at the last second by Miliband, who had rushed back from his hotel room to call for an adjournment. During the recess, a group led by Britain, the US and Australia forced Rasmussen out of the chair and negotiated a last-minute compromise. The accord was neither accepted or rejected, it was merely "noted". This gave it a semblance of recognition, but the weak language reflected the unease that has surrounded its inception. Copenhagen was the leakiest international conference in history. The first leak, on the second day of the conference, came after a mysterious telephone invitation to meet a diplomat in a cubbyhole at the back of one of the delegation offices.

Two sheets of paper were handed over. They were the detailed analysis of the "Danish text", a widely rumoured but never seen document prepared by a few rich countries in secret and almost certainly intended to be sprung on unsuspecting developing countries when there was an impasse at a late stage in the negotiations.

But without the actual text, the document was incomplete and hard to use. The leaker said that other papers would be handed over to the Guardian off the premises the next day, but the call never came. The day was only saved by an another leaker from another country who handed over a copy of the Danish text within 24 hours. The two leaks together exploded into the negotiations, with developing countries convinced of a conspiracy and rich countries furious as their plans were revealed. If adopted, the text would have killed off the Kyoto treaty, which puts legal demands on rich nations, but not developing ones.

As the conference went on, the leaks became more regular, until by the end there was a flood. Three days before the end, a confidential scientific analysis paper emerged from the heart of the UN secretariat, showing that the emission-cut pledges countries had made by that point would lead not to a 2C rise, as countries were aiming for, but a 3C rise that would frazzle half the world. Britain and other rich countries claimed that the figures were wrong, despite other analyses agreeing with them. But developing countries accused the UN of knowingly consigning countries to destruction.

In the last 24 hours, it became negotiation by leak. Secret documents were deliberately left on photocopiers, others were thrust into journalists' hands or put on the web. People were photographing them and handing them around all the time. All eight versions of the final text that world leaders were asked to sign up to were leaked within minutes of being published. The talks repeatedly teetered on the brink of collapse.

CONTINUED ON newsgdn2

news20091220gdn2

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Copenhagen Climate change conference 2009]
Copenhagen: The last-ditch drama that saved the deal from collapse
In the end it came down to frantic horse trading between exhausted politicians. After two weeks of high politics and low cunning that pitted world leaders against each other and threw up extraordinary new alliances between states, agreement was finally reached yesterday on an accord to tackle global warming. But the bitterness and recriminations that bedevilled the talks threaten to spread as environmental activists and scientists react to what many see as a deeply flawed deal
John Vidal and Jonathan Watts
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 20 December 2009 00.05 GMT Article history

CONTINUED FROM newsgdn1

As the talks were snared on procedural issues inside the conference hall, civil society was getting angry. As the arrival of the 120 world leaders approached, more and more restrictions were imposed on who was allowed in. The 7,000 colourful and noisy kids, environmentalists, church groups, lobbyists, students, activists and others who had been allowed into the Bella centre every day were first reduced to 1,000 and then to just 90 on the last day.

Mainstream groups such as Friends of the Earth International and Greenpeace were cut down from hundreds of activists to only a few each. Asian and African groups were hit the hardest because entry was in proportion to membership size.

Posters went up – "How can you decide for us without us?" and "Civil society silenced" – and there were demonstrations, but by the end the Bella centre was silenced.

Before the start of the conference, it had been assumed the leaders would only have to settle two or three issues when they arrived at Copenhagen, but by the time they walked in there were still 192 disputed pieces of text in the drafts.

Rather than reopen debate following the frantic final 24 hours of horse trading, the new chair gavelled through the decision in a fraction of a second. Sudan, China and India expressed concerns, but the Copenhagen accord had been born. Though frail and unloved, this document will shape the lives of generations. Though many environmentalists claimed no deal was better than such a weak deal, those most closely involved in the negotiations said it marked progress of a sort.

"It was definitely worth saving," said Miliband. "This is the first time that developed and developing nations have agreed to deal with emissions and the first time the world has agreed on a deal on climate finance."

Money is likely to oil the deal. Only nations that accept the UN document will be entitled to some of the $30bn dollar start-up fund that will be made available over the next three years to tackle deforestation, share technology and deal with the impact of climate change.

UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon said the negotiations that ultimately involved 113 leaders were unprecedented in UN history, but the effort had been worth while.

"Finally we have sealed the deal. Bringing world leaders to the table paid off," said Ban, who had slept only two hours in the previous two days. "It's not what everyone hoped for, but this is a beginning."

The sentiments were echoed by John Hay, spokesman for the United Nations framework convention on climate change: "At the UNFPCCC, there has been quite a bit of drama over the years. But this may top the list."

Outside the conference hall yesterday, more than 100 protesters chanted: "You're destroying our future!" Some carried signs of Obama with the words "climate shame" pasted on his face.

Friends of the Earth said the "secret backroom declaration" failed to take into account the needs of more than a hundred countries". "This toothless declaration, being spun by the US as a historic success, reflects contempt for the multilateral process and we expect more from our Nobel prize-winning president," said the group's spokeswoman, Kate Horner.

Negotiators put on a brave face. In the early hours, as he headed out into the bitterly cold, Brian Cowen, the Irish taoiseach, expressed disappointment at the outcome.

"The substance of the European Union's [offers] was robustly put, but we couldn't get the commitment of others," Cowen said. "We did not achieve everything we wanted, but the reality is that this is as much as can be advanced at this stage."

China seemed more satisfied. "The meeting has had a positive result, everyone should be happy," said Xie Zhenhua, head of the Chinese delegation.

news20091220gdn3

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Copenhagen Climate change conference 2009]
Why I believe all is not lost – yet
The nature of the climate change deal finally hammered out yesterday is a bitter disappointment to many, but if the world can acknowledge what went wrong at Copenhagen and learn from it, then we can still step back from the brink of disaster
Robin McKie
The Observer, Sunday 20 December 2009 Article history

The Antarctic peninsula is a vast finger of land that protrudes into the Southern Ocean. It is as inhospitable a place as one can imagine; a land of ice and blizzard. Yet the peninsula is currently under- going a remarkable transformation. Over the past six decades, temperatures there have jumped by a staggering 5C. Populations of one of the peninsula's key inhabitants, the Adelie penguins, are plummeting as ice sheets crack and melt.

Now consider the other side of the planet. Sea ice cover in the Arctic is hovering at its lowest level for the time of year since records began. In a few decades, it will probably disappear completely during the summer months, say researchers. The consequences for wildlife, such as the polar bear, are perturbing.

Sandwiched in between is the rest of the planet, which is now afflicted, in every continent, by climate change driven by rising emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from factories, homes and cars.

This decade will be the warmest recorded in 160 years, say meteorologists. At the same time, rising sea levels are poisoning fresh water wells in Bangladesh, droughts are becoming longer and more frequent in east Africa, and coral reefs are dying as oceans absorb more and more carbon dioxide and become increasingly acidic.

Our world is changing and urgent action is needed to save it, which makes the feebleness of the climate change deal hammered out in Copenhagen yesterday such a bitter disappointment. The planet needed a blueprint for survival. What it got was a nebulous accord that falls desperately short on specifics. No binding limits on individual countries' emissions were established, a criterion crucial for halting the current increase of carbon in the atmosphere. Nor was any deadline agreed for establishing such limits.

Instead, delegates merely stipulated that the world needs to keep future global temperature rises below 2C, a figure that scientists say will prevent the worst impacts of climate change. The exact mechanism for achieving this aspiration was left to future negotiations, however.

Not surprisingly, the limp language of the Copenhagen accord has gone down badly with many NGOs. "Half-hearted pledges to protect our planet from dangerous climate change are simply not sufficient to address a crisis that calls for completely new ways of collaboration across rich and poor countries," said Kim Carstensen, leader of WWF's global climate initiative. Andy Atkins, executive director of Friends of the Earth, was equally enraged: "This toothless declaration condemns millions of the world's poorest people to hunger, suffering and loss of life as climate change accelerates. We need a profound change of approach from the world's wealthiest countries to secure a genuine strong and fair agreement."

You get the message. Our leaders fluffed their chance to save the planet. The question is: was this their last chance? In other words, can something still be salvaged from the Copenhagen accord? Most leaders, including Gordon Brown and Barack Obama, believe the answer is yes. As they point out, the accord – although failing to specify carbon emission cuts – does pledge a sum of $30bn to provide short-term aid to help developing nations cope with the effects of climate change while also agreeing the goal of setting up a $100bn-a-year fund by 2020 to address their longer-term needs. These are significant commitments that have raised the hopes of a number of scientists and commentators. "I think there is reason to be optimistic – it's the first time we've ever got the world to think about a single-number aspiration: that we should not cross more than two degrees of global warming," said Chris Huntingford, of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. "I hope that will lead to some sort of legally binding agreement."

Nicholas Stern, chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, has been equally confident: "The summit has generated, for the first time, commitments on emissions reductions from the world's two largest emitters, China and the US, and they have acted for the first time to produce proposals for action. These two results represent an important breakthrough."

These are fair points and suggest that all is not yet lost. However, we should be in no doubt about the challenges and the dangers that lie ahead. Should we fail to keep global temperature rises down to 2C, and allow them to reach 3 or 4C, we will inflict immense damage to ecosytems, farmland and weather systems. Large chunks of the Amazon rainforest could burn down while deserts will spread across southern Africa, Australia and the western US. Methane and carbon dioxide, currently trapped in the frozen permafrost of the Arctic, will be released in vast quantities, triggering further jumps in global temperatures. Sea-level rises could reach 5 metres by the end of the century, submerging large parts of Bangladesh, the Netherlands and Florida. The consequences for humans, and animals, would be terrible.

But given that the Copenhagen accord includes only a vague commitment concerning the reduction of carbon emissions, how can we hope to curtail global warming? We are pumping around 47bn tonnes of greenhouse gases, mostly carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere each year. If we are to avoid temperature rises of more than 2C, emissions must peak and begin to decline by 2020 and then drop to around 35bn by 2030 and 20bn in 2050, say scientists. Each year of inaction makes these targets more difficult to achieve, however. The more carbon that is pumped into the atmosphere this year, the more stringent reductions will have to be in future years. We are piling up crises for future generations.

The cause is clearly urgent and it is crucial that lessons are learned from Copenhagen, a point stressed by Andrew Pendleton, senior fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research. "The cumbersome process and overloaded agenda meant failure was programmed into the system from the beginning," he has pointed out. "Leaders came to Copenhagen to rewrite history and left having made a few notes in the margin."

Clearly, a radical reframing of climate change policy needs to be adopted so that a proper deal can be struck at next year's climate talks in Mexico. Stern has suggested that a group of 20 nations be set up now so that its representatives can work on a draft treaty, and develop a consensus about future deals among other nations. Faced with an agenda stripped of crippling detail, our leaders will then be far more likely to agree to a formula that will allow us to tackle global warming. At the same time, individual nations and power blocs, such as the EU, need to announce their own binding carbon cut commitments and maintain the momentum of the Copenhagen talks.

In short, a deal to halt global warming can be done. We can step back from the brink if we acknowledge what went wrong in Copenhagen. Certainly, I am disappointed in the outcome of this month's summit but I am not despondent – for the moment.

WHAT IT ACHIEVED

Acceptance by most nations that global temperature rises must be kept under 2C.

Promise to give poorer nations up to $30bn to cope with climate change.

A goal of $100bn a year for poorer nations by 2020, for adapting to global warming and clean technology.

Funding to enable forest nations to protect trees from loggers and farmers.

Preserves Kyoto protocol, which places binding responsibility on rich nations.

WHAT IT DID NOT ACHIEVE

No targets whatsoever for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Hitting the deadline for a legally binding treaty, as set out in Bali in 2007.

No future deadline set for the legally binding deal to cut carbon emissions.

No guarantee or information on where the climate funds will come from.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

Negotiators will try to complete details on deforestation and other lower-level issues.

Countries must register their planned emissions cuts by the end of January.

The UN's climate body's meeting in Bonn in May will tackle the issue of emissions.

The major annual meeting will convene on 7 December 2010 in Mexico, which will aim to seal a legal treaty.

news20091220gdn4

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Copenhagen Climate change conference 2009]
Copenhagen: The key players and how they rated
The agreement brokered by Barack Obama has faced international criticism from all sides, but most participants are already back home trying to portray it as a national political victory
Suzanne Goldenberg in Copenhagen, Toby Helm and John Vidal
The Observer, Sunday 20 December 2009 Article history

Barack Obama

The last time Barack Obama took a chance on Copenhagen it ended in abject humiliation.

The president hopped on a flight to the Danish capital to join a campaign by Oprah Winfrey and his wife, Michelle, to try to win Chicago the right to host the 2016 Olympic Games. But the Obamas' reliance on their high-voltage star power fell flat.

The International Olympic Committee eliminated Chicago in the first round of voting. When Obama returned to Washington, Republicans accused him of diminishing the office of president, and using up too much American political capital on such a frivolous matter.

On this return visit, the president did rather better. He flew home into a winter snowstorm in Washington able to claim that – after two years of negotiations had ended in deadlock – he had persuaded the world's biggest producers of greenhouse gases to act on global warming.

Environmentalists denounced the deal as a sham; and even Obama described its achievements as "modest". As he told a press conference on Friday night, holding out for a better deal might have meant no deal: "There might be such frustration and cynicism that, rather than taking one step forward, we ended up taking two steps back."

The White House will be able to spin Obama's efforts into a portrait of muscular diplomacy. His speech to the summit, in which he sourly noted the distance that remained to a deal, showed the president was prepared to come down hard against political opponents – a capability that has not been in full view in Washington.

That could help blunt Republican claims that the president – once again – gambled and lost at Copenhagen, and weakened America on the international stage. For Democrats, the weakness of the Copenhagen deal may be something of a relief. Obama did not commit America to any new action, giving them additional wriggle room to frame climate legislation with a strong chance of being passed in the Senate.

The deal that emerged in Copenhagen allows Obama to claim that he got China to meet America's demand that it provide accountability of its actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The issue had been one of the biggest sticking points in negotiations, and getting some elements of a compromise from China was crucial to Obama's efforts to get the legislation through the Senate.

Republican and Democratic senators from Midwest manufacturing states have been adamant that any deal should not give a competitive advantage to Chinese and Indian industry.

As they returned home on Air Force One, White House officials gave a detailed briefing on how Obama worked his way around a Chinese protocol officer who he thought was getting in the way of his meeting with Wen Jiabao. They also suggested the president had walked uninvited into a meeting of China, India, Brazil, and South Africa. The White House had previously thought the meeting would be a one-on-one between Wen and Obama.

"The only surprise we had, in all honesty, was… that in that room wasn't just the Chinese having a meeting… but in fact all four countries that we had been trying to arrange meetings with," the White House official said. "The president's viewpoint is: I wanted to see them all, and now is our chance."

Obama's deal does not, of course, come close to what science says must be done on global warming, and falls far short of the UN's ambitions. It was widely condemned by African and even European officials as soon as Obama left the conference centre – and predictably by Venezuela's Hugo Chávez. "We will reject any document Obama tries to slide over the top," he said.

But the huge shortfalls, and the grumblings of African countries, are not going to matter as much in Washington as the fact that Obama can claim that he went face to face with China – and won.

Suzanne Goldenberg

Gordon Brown

Miliband's late-night dash helped avert a conference crisis
An exhausted Ed Miliband was in his pyjamas and about to get into bed at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Copenhagen when he made a final check call to an official at 4am. The climate change secretary could not believe what he heard.

After two weeks of summitry and years of preparation, an accord had finally been agreed by 30 countries, including the UK and US. Now it just had to be ratified by the full 192 nations present to gain formal UN status. It looked like a formality — far from perfect, but it was something for leaders across the globe to take home.

However, the official told Miliband that five countries – Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Sudan and Saudi Arabia – were cutting up rough and saying they would veto a deal. The whole summit could end in complete failure.

Miliband tore back to the conference centre and entered the meeting to hear the Sudanese official Lumumba Stanislas Dia-ping comparing the agreement to the Holocaust. The pact, he said, was "a solution based on values, the very same values in our opinion that funnelled six million people in Europe into furnaces". It "asked Africa to sign a suicide pact, an incineration pact, in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries".

Delegates from a number of western countries quickly took to the floor to denounce the Sudanese delegate's references as offensive, among them Miliband, who is Jewish. It was a "disgusting comparison" which he said "should offend people across this conference whatever background they come from".

Officials in Copenhagen said Miliband, as much as anyone, helped to rescue the meeting from potential disaster by his intervention. Certainly, few governments had been as intensely and closely involved in the Copenhagen negotiations for the past few months as the British one, with Gordon Brown and Miliband taking the lead.

For Brown, who is desperate to portray himself as a global statesman, a father figure of world politics following his success in leading the global rescue of the banking system last year, Copenhagen was a perfect chance. He had been the first to propose the idea of a global fund to help developing countries obtain new clean energy technology and protect their peoples from the worst ravages of climate change. Brown devised the idea that industrialised countries set up a $100bn climate fund for developing countries, a plan now enshrined in the Copenhagen deal.

The UK government also championed turning Copenhagen into a fully-fledged summit of prime ministers and presidents, which Barack Obama would have little option but to attend.

Miliband had turned up the rhetoric in the week's before Copenhagen, warning in an interview with the Observer a fortnight ago that the consequence of failure would be "scary" in terms of the effect on the environment. There would be more floods like those in Cumbria, rising sea levels, and disastrous economic consequences as the world tried to contain the problems in future. He said "children will hold us in contempt" if we failed. So if he and the prime minister had to return to the UK empty-handed, the failure would have been hugely politically damaging.

Last night after returning, Miliband maintained that although he would have preferred a legally binding accord, there was much in the agreement that represented significant progress. "There is a danger of too much negativity," he said. "There are important things in this agreement, including on carbon emissions, which is on course towards two degrees, and on the finance. We recognise there could have been more ambition in parts of this agreement. Therefore we have to drive forward as hard as we can towards both a legally binding treaty and that ambition."

Unfortunately for Brown he did not receive a name check from Obama in his roll call of those to be thanked for their efforts to reach a deal. But the upside was that, thanks in part to his climate change secretary, there were at least some fruits of their late night labours to talk about on return.

Toby Helm

China

Promise that can't be proved
Barack Obama was not the only world leader prepared to play hardball at the conference, as China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao, also demonstrated that he could withstand pressure from the international community.

Although China, in signing the deal, commits for the first time to curbing the rate of growth of its emissions, Wen can claim that he safeguarded the country's economic future.

China fought hard against strong pressure from America to submit to an international regime that would monitor if it was indeed cutting emissions as promised.

When Obama said China's stand on accountability would consign any deal to "empty words on a page", Wen walked out of the conference centre and went back to his hotel.

He later delivered an additional snub by sending a protocol officer to talk to Obama.

Suzanne Goldenberg

CONTINUED ON newgdn5

news20091220gdn5

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Copenhagen Climate change conference 2009]
Copenhagen: The key players and how they rated
The agreement brokered by Barack Obama has faced international criticism from all sides, but most participants are already back home trying to portray it as a national political victory
Suzanne Goldenberg in Copenhagen, Toby Helm and John Vidal
The Observer, Sunday 20 December 2009 Article history

CONTINUED FROM newsgdn4

The EU

Nightmare avoided – but not embarrassment
Europe came to Copenhagen as the bloc that potentially stood to lose the most. The fear was that the US and other countries would refuse to cut their emissions further, but the EU would be forced by public pressure, or by the US , to cut from 20% to 30%, as it had promised to do if there was an ambitious deal.

This would leave it carrying most of the cuts and economically compromised.

The EU need not have worried. No country forced its hand on emission cuts in the negotiations, and it was itself comprehensively split, with countries such as Poland and even Germany reportedly blocking moves by Britain and others to put the cuts on the table.

One European country that played a key role was Denmark, the host, but this turned out to be an embarrassment.

Connie Hedegaard, the Danish climate minister, started well but was forced at the start of week two to step down in favour of the Danish prime minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, officially because it would be inappropriate for a mere climate minister to meet and greet world leaders. But it was an open secret that she was at odds with her leader and the rich countries preferred their own man.

Then Lars Løkke Rasmussen proved to be out of his depth at this level of politics. He, too, was forced to step down, probably by the UK, Australia, Canada and others.

Denmark also gave the world the "Danish text", a semi-secret set of proposals prepared with the rich countries. to be pushed for at the end of the talks. It was leaked to the Guardian on day two, and from then on the fight between rich and poor countries was furious.

John Vidal

Africa

Bold nations wield their new power
The talks saw Africa assert itself on the world stage. The poorest and climatically most vulnerable continent has the most to lose from temperature increases and formed its own negotiating group for the first time.

Led by President Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, it stunned France, Britain and other rich nations last month by unexpectedly walking out of a preparatory UN climate conference meeting in Barcelona. The carefully planned move forced the UN into giving Africa and the concerns of the poorest more negotiating time.

Africa came to Copenhagen emboldened and, with the backing of international environment and development groups, staked out the moral high ground. By demanding the deepest emission cuts from the rich, and stoutly defending the Kyoto protocol – the only legal agreement that forces such countries to cut emissions – it was for once at the dead centre of global politics.

But Africa also has added clout in climate politics because of its close and growing links with China, the world's biggest producer of emissions. China has invested more than any other country in Africa's metals, oil and forests, and it now has more allies there than in most other continents.

Just as the US used Britain and its friends to make its arguments at Copenhagen, so China used Africa. But it worked both ways: in an astonishingly bold move, it seems that Africa at one point threatened to withhold its resources from China if it joined other countries in trying to abandon the Kyoto protocol.

But the continent also threw up one of the most interesting new figures on the world stage. Lumumba Di-aping, the Sudanese ambassador to New York, is a McKinsey and Oxford-trained radical economist who not only matched the media spin of western countries, but was partly behind George Soros's plan to use hundreds of billions of dollars of IMF special drawing rights to fund the financial deal.

In the end, the west exerted its traditional influence in Africa. President Meles was courted strongly by presidents Sarkozy, Brown and Obama in the days before the world leaders met, to try to bring Africa aboard the west's deal.

Meles proposed that developing countries accept $100bn a year – a remarkably similar sum to what the west had suggested. The accusations soon flew that Ethiopia had been bought and Meles was immediately slapped down by his peers.

Africa ended the talks divided, but knowing that it now plays a far more important role in the new politics of climate change.

John Vidal



[Environment > Copenhagen Climate change conference 2009]
Ed Miliband: China tried to hijack Copenhagen climate deal
Climate secretary accuses China, Sudan, Bolivia and other leftwing Latin American countries of trying to hijack Copenhagen
John Vidal, environment editor
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 20 December 2009 20.30 GMT Article history

The climate secretary, Ed Miliband, today accuses China, Sudan, Bolivia and other leftwing Latin American countries of trying to hijack the UN climate summit and "hold the world to ransom" to prevent a deal being reached.

In an article in the Guardian, Miliband says the UK will make clear to those countries holding out against a binding legal treaty that "we will not allow them to block global progress".

"We cannot again allow negotiations on real points of substance to be hijacked in this way," he writes in the aftermath of the UN summit in Copenhagen, which climaxed with what was widely seen as a weak accord, with no binding emissions targets, despite an unprecedented meeting of leaders.

Miliband said there must be "major reform" of the UN body overseeing the talks – the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – and on the way negotiations are conducted. He is said to be outraged that UN procedure allowed a few countries to nearly block a deal.

The prime minister, Gordon Brown, will repeat some of the UK's accusations in a webcast tomorrow when he says: "Never again should we face the deadlock that threatened to pull down [those] talks. Never again should we let a global deal to move towards a greener future be held to ransom by only a handful of countries."

Only China is mentioned specifically in Miliband's article but aides tonight made it clear that he included Sudan, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Cuba, which also tried to resist a deal being signed.

But in what threatened to become an international incident, diplomats and environment groups hit back by saying Britain and other countries, including the US and Australia, had dictated the terms of the weak Copenhagen agreement, imposing it on the world's poor "at the peril of the millions of common masses".

Muhammed Chowdhury, a lead negotiator of G77 group of 132 developing countries and the 47 least developed countries, said: "The hopes of millions of people from Fiji to Grenada, Bangladesh to Barbados, Sudan to Somalia have been buried. The summit failed to deliver beyond taking note of a watered-down Copenhagen accord reached by some 25 friends of the Danish chair, head of states and governments. They dictated the terms at the peril of the common masses."

Developing countries were joined in their criticism of the developed nations by international environment groups.

Nnimmo Bassey, chair of Friends of the Earth International, said: "Instead of committing to deep cuts in emissions and putting new, public money on the table to help solve the climate crisis, rich countries have bullied developing nations to accept far less.

"Those most responsible for putting the planet in this mess have not shown the guts required to fix it and have instead acted to protect short-term political interests.".

In a separate development, senior scientists said tonight that rich countries needed to put up three times as much money and cut emissions more if they were to avoid serious climate change.

Professor Martin Parry of Imperial College London, a former chair of the UN's Nobel prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said: "Even if non-binding pledges made at Copenhagen are completely fulfilled, there is a 1.5C 'gap' leading to unavoided impacts. The funding for adaptation covers impacts up to about 1.5C, and the mitigation pledges to cut climate change down to 3C at most ... leaving 1.5C of impacts not avoided because of the failure of adaptation and mitigation to close the gap."

The UN climate chief, Yvo de Boer, said: "The opportunity to actually make it into the scientific window of opportunity is getting smaller and smaller."

news20091220nn

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 19 December 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.1156
News
Copenhagen accord emerges
Climate agreement is seen as a small, but necessary, step forward.
Jeff Tollefson

International delegates at the United Nations climate talks in Copenhagen on Saturday formally recognized a bare-bones mandate to curb greenhouse gas emissions — a multilateral political deal brokered the day before by leaders of the United States, China, India, South Africa and Brazil.

Under the accord, greenhouse gas commitments proposed by industrialized nations and the major emerging economies — as well as anyone else who cares to sign up — would be placed into a registry for monitoring and verification. Industrialized countries would be bound to meet their emissions reductions, while developing countries would be required to audit and report their domestic actions every two years. Any actions undertaken with international aid would be "subject to international measurement, reporting and verification".

The handshake agreement superseded two years of negotiations and set the Bella Center in Copenhagen abuzz. Many, though not all, environmentalists called the agreement a disaster; speaking to a crowd of journalists shortly after the announcement, Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, chief negotiator for the G77 group of developing countries, called the deal a "gross violation" of the UN process that would do little to curb global warming. "Sudan will not be a signatory to a deal that will destroy Africa," he said. The proposal drew numerous other objections from developing country representatives.

Nonetheless, US president Barack Obama called the pact "meaningful and unprecedented" and said it was a necessary step to break the gridlock. "For the first time in history," he said, "all major economies have come together to accept their responsibility to take action to confront the threat of climate change."

Convincing Congress

In many ways, the agreement was aimed at the US Senate as much as at the international community. In 1997, 95 senators voted for a resolution condemning the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, which the Copenhagen meeting was meant to broker a replacement for, in part because of the lack of participation by developing countries. Similar concerns are in play in the current debate over domestic climate legislation, and language requiring developing countries to report and verify their emissions was crucial to US negotiators.

Debate over the accord continued all Friday night and into Saturday afternoon. Most developing countries ended up endorsing the document as a necessary, if small, step forward. But a handful of countries led by Sudan, Bolivia and Venezuela sought to kill the deal.

At one point Danish prime minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen was forced to declare its failure due to rules requiring consensus, but advocates led by British climate secretary Ed Miliband were able to revive the agreement in a slightly different form. Instead of making all parties subject to the agreement, countries have the option of joining the accord or not.

UN climate chief Yvo de Boer called the conference a rollercoaster but said the end result was "an impressive accord" that forms a solid basis for ongoing talks.

The document cites a goal of holding the global rise in average global temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius but does not specify a long-term goal for reducing emissions. An early draft suggested that the end goal would be a "legally binding instrument" by next year's UN meeting in Mexico — a goal endorsed by Obama — but that language was later dropped, a move that many called a step backward.

Financing adaptation

Following up on discussions in the regular negotiations, the accord would establish a start-up fund of roughly $30 billion over the next three years to help developing countries prepare for a warmer climate, integrate new technologies into sustainable development plans and protect their forests. Developed countries would also aim to mobilize $100 billion annually by 2020 to help developing countries, although the language suggests that such monies could be contingent on actions by the recipients.

Negotiations will continue in the coming year. Countries that are party to the 1997 Kyoto protocol will continue to discuss a post-2012 commitment period; negotiators on a second track that includes the United States, which is not party to Kyoto, will continue under the main UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Perhaps the largest criticism was that none of the leaders who arrived in Copenhagen actually increased their nations' commitments to reduce greenhouse gases. As it stands, the agreement merely notes in legal language that such commitments exist. Still, given the lack of progress over the last two years, some consider that significant progress.

"I might have turned into a wild-eyed optimist, but for the fact that there were numbers on the table at all," says Elliot Diringer, who works on international climate policy for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change in Arlington, Virginia. "It's certainly far short of what we need, but it would provide a reasonable basis for negotiating a fair and effective climate treaty."

news20091220bbc

[One-Minute World News] from [BBC NEWS]

[Science & Environment]
Page last updated at 10:40 GMT, Sunday, 20 December 2009
China and Indonesia welcome Copenhagen summit deal
{After two weeks of frantic talks, the 193-nation ended on Saturday}
Asian giants China and Indonesia have hailed the Copenhagen UN climate summit outcome, despite its cool reception from aid agencies and campaigners.

Beijing's foreign minister said it was a new beginning, and Indonesia's leader said he was pleased with the result.

Earlier, US President Barack Obama defended the accord he helped broker with China and other main powers.

The non-binding pact, called the Copenhagen Accord, was not adopted by consensus at the summit in Denmark.

Instead, after two weeks of frantic negotiations, the 193-nation conference ended on Saturday with delegates merely taking note of the deal.

BBC environment correspondent Richard Black says the accord looks unlikely to contain temperature rises to within the 2C (3.6F) threshold that UN scientists say is needed to avert serious climate change.

{{Copenhagen is not a destination but a new beginning}
Yang Jiechi
China's Foreign Minister}

It includes a recognition to limit temperature rises to less than 2C and promises to deliver $30bn (£18.5bn) of aid for developing nations over the next three years.

The agreement outlines a goal of providing $100bn a year by 2020 to help poor countries cope with the impacts of climate change.

It also includes a method for verifying industrialised nations' reduction of emissions. The US had insisted that China dropped its resistance to this measure.

'Make it binding'

China's Foreign Minister, Yang Jiechi, praised the summit in a statement which said: "Developing and developed countries are very different in their historical emissions responsibilities and current emissions levels, and in their basic national characteristics and development stages.

"Therefore, they should shoulder different responsibilities and obligations in fighting climate change."

{The accord was denounced by campaigners and some delegates}

"The Copenhagen conference is not a destination but a new beginning," he added.

His upbeat note was echoed by Indonesia, ranked the world's third-largest polluter after the US and China, if the effects of deforestation are taken into account.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said in a statement on his website: "Indonesia is pleased, as [we have] taken a wholehearted stance to save our Earth, to save the children in our country," reports AFP news agency.

Environmental campaigners and aid agencies have branded the deal a toothless failure.

But the head of the Nobel-winning UN panel of climate scientists said on Sunday the outcome of the summit was a start, though he urged countries to make it binding.

Hopes for Mexico

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told India's NDTV news channel: "We will have to build on it.

"We will have to make sure it moves quickly towards the status of a legally binding agreement and therefore I think the task for the global community is cut out."

Germany will host the next climate change conference in six months in Bonn, to follow up the work of the Copenhagen summit.

The final outcome is supposed to be sealed at a conference in Mexico City at the end of 2010.

US President Barack Obama defended the deal after arriving back in Washington on Saturday, describing it as "the foundation for international action in the years to come".

The Copenhagen Accord is based on a proposal tabled on Friday by a US-led group of five nations - including China, India, Brazil and South Africa.

It was lambasted by some delegations when put to a full session of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change at the summit.

A few developing countries said it was a cosy backroom deal between rich nations that violated UN democracy and would condemn the world to disastrous climate change.

Before the summit, China for the first time offered to limit its greenhouse gas output.

It pledged to reduce its carbon intensity - use of fossil fuels per unit of economic output - by up to 45%, although critics said this would not necessarily lead to any overall cut in its emissions.