The Copenhagen Accord: one step forward, two steps back?

The long awaited conference, which was to be the culmination of a two-year negotiating marathon under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), did not produce the desired results. Instead of a legally binding document to take the place of the Kyoto Protocol, only a compromise agreement was reached with very general goals. When UN General-Secretary Ban Ki-Moon, in the spirit of this year’s UN campaign to support a new climate agreement, declared Saturday morning that diplomats had finally adopted an agreement, few had reason to celebrate. Representatives from numerous NGOs went so far as to say that no agreement is better than a bad agreement.

The general language of the agreement’s individual provisions testifies to the inability of world leaders to make progress in blocked negotiations and find common ground on the most important points of the future climate protection regime. The manner in which the agreement was adopted also provoked a wave of animosity, since only the United States, China, India, Brazil and South Africa contributed to the resulting compromise proposal, the so-called Copenhagen Accord. After exhausting negotiations that lasted through the night, all of the parties agreed to merely “take note of” the document. A number of Small Island Developing States and the least developed countries objected to the document, pointing out its inability to prevent dramatic changes in the earth’s climate. Sudan and several Latin American states (Bolivia, Venezuela and others) were vocal critics. In general it can be expected that in certain aspects the agreement will probably weaken the Bali Action Plan instead of developing it further.

The Copenhagen Accord adopts the recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) that average growth of the world temperature be held below 2 °C. Thanks to the negotiating efforts of Small Island States this long-term goal can be revaluated if necessary in favour of temperature limits that are half a degree lower. The agreement includes blank annexes in which developed and developing countries should specify, by the end of January 2010, concrete commitments to reduce the production of greenhouse gases or to limit their growth. According to internal information from the secretary of the UNFCCC that appeared in the media, the existing offers point instead to the opposite scenario that will lead to the growth of the average global temperature by 3 °C.

One of the few more specific proposals represents a quantification of financial support that should be directed to developing countries. In the next three years developed states should provide these countries USD 30 billion, 100 billion by the year 2020. This offer is less than the earlier demands of developing countries, and doesn’t even reach estimates by the World Bank, NGOs (ActionAid, Oxfam) and the European Union. This collective commitment by developed countries should come from both public and private sources as well as innovative tools which the agreement doesn’t specify in greater detail. The flow of funds should be based on the needs of individual countries to ensure that they have foreseeable and new resources for adaptive measures and to support the transition to a low-carbon model of development. The greatest drawback of the final version of the document is the absence of a more elaborate plan for outlining the creation of a new legally binding tool under UNFCCC following the end of the first round of the Kyoto Protocol in 2012.

The hectic and highly impassioned conclusion of the conference and the method in which the final document was produced and introduced offer much food for thought.[1] This concerns not only the content (the individual building blocks of the future climate regime) but also the dynamics of negotiating between the developed and developing world. The resulting document was created in a tight circle of five nations; missing from this group were delegates from the least developed countries and also the European Union. The United States and China (in that order) were labelled as the culprits of the insufficiently ambitious agreement.

But what does an agreement with such a weak mandate mean for the joint efforts of the international community in the fight against global warming? Should the world expect the collapse of international talks under the heading of UNFCCC? Are the conflicts between individual negotiating groups (and even inside these) so serious that only a very weak document has a chance? Will climate change and, in particular, the people at greatest risk, wait for genuine “climate leaders”? What signal does the Copenhagen conference send the business world and people interested in investing in the energy sector? These and many other questions can be asked now; answers will come in the months ahead. Individual countries must transform the Copenhagen Accord into actions within the bounds of their possibilities.

Advanced countries should, with a sense of urgency, come up with ambitious targets for reducing emissions and, using the tools mentioned in the agreement (such as the Copenhagen Green Climate Fund), finance adaptive measures in countries facing the greatest threats. With sufficient political will and a genuine desire to negotiate, even the very weak result of the Copenhagen conference can help specific people. Politicians should make good on their inadequate promises and, at the same time, work to strengthen them. Let’s hope that negotiations over the coming year and the UNFCCC summit in Mexico will produce a strong successor to the Kyoto Protocol.

[1] The Copenhagen Accord and other outcomes of the conference are available on the official conference website at http://unfccc.int/2860.php.