Sriniwas Krishnaswamy

It is almost a month since the Copenhagen Climate summit ended and was followed by a spate of articles analysing the so-called deal arrived at in Copenhagen. The general sentiment is that the summit was a huge failure, but a smaller section believes and reframes it as a small step forward. To get a holistic picture of what happened at the Copenhagen climate summit and where we stand today vis-àvis the climate negotiation process, it is important to look at the whole process of negotiations. Let us start from the outcomes of the Bali Summit of December 2007 through to Copenhagen.

The journey from Bali The Bali Action Plan came out with a near-comprehensive roadmap for negotiations for a post 2012 climate framework. This clearly identified the major thrust areas for negotiating namely, adaptation, mitigation, finance and technological cooperation, with an overarching Global Climate Vision or shared vision, as it was called. The Bali Roadmap, therefore, kick-started the formal negotiations for the post-2012 climate regime in two separate tracks: Kyoto Protocol track (AWG-KP) looking at continuation of (an amended) Kyoto Protocol in a second commitment period (post 2012); and a global track (AWGLCA: Ad-hoc Working Group on Long term Cooperative Action) dealing with the elements.

Intense negotiations, amounting to close to four months of hard-core negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), took place during 2008 and 2009 on both tracks culminating in the Climate Summit in Copenhagen. Little progress was made before Copenhagen. The summit started with a 170 pages of negotiating text full of brackets in the LCA track and a 70 pages text full of brackets in the KP track.

Complete failure During the first week of the Copenhagen summit, diplomats and experts widely discussed a whole series of new texts without making any progress. And by the time ministers joined in, nothing more could be presented than two series of texts (one in the KP-track and one in the LCA-track) which remained full of brackets and leaving out the crunch issues such as: a) Specific emission reduction targets for developed countries. b) Specific numbers for financial support for action in developing countries.  c) The legal nature of the agreement On the eve of the high-level segment, talks collapsed, with negotiators confused over their role versus the role of the ministers.

The Danish Presidency did little to contain the confusion and in reality it added fuel to the confusion. Another dimension was added with the arrival of over 120 Heads of States and a few of them getting together to draft what is now known as the Copenhagen Accord.  The draft Copenhagen Accord was linked to the draft decision of the UNFCCC’s Conference of Parties and Meeting of Parties (COP and COP/MOP) decision. This was further negotiated in the last and dying moments of the Summit, amidst growing opposition. Eventually, a consensus emerged not to adopt the accord as a COP and COP/MOP decision but just a noting of it, with a call to countries to subscribe to it individually. Some of the countries said the accord in itself would lead to a climate disaster. Sudan’s representatives went to the extent of calling it as “a suicide pact”.

The reason being, the accord does not detail any deep emission reduction targets for industrialised countries in a legally binding frame work. Instead allows them to commit to implement economy-wide emissions targets by 2020 on the basis of individual country pledges. That too with the existing emission reduction offers made by some of them, which is not more than 15-18 per cent emission reduction to 1990 levels by 2020. This is far short of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggested range of 25-40 per cent emission reduction target to 1990 levels by 2020. The accord neither mentioned the issue of flexible mechanisms nor did it mention the Kyoto Protocol’s rules. It is still unclear whether and how issues such as the banking of hot air, land use and land use change, and forestry and offsets will be dealt with. On the issue of financing, governments agreed to provide adequate, new and additional funding to developing countries to finance action on mitigation, deforestation, adaptation, technology development and transfer and capacitybuilding. The step which can be termed as positive from the summit, is the commitment made in the accord by the developed countries to raise US $30 billion for the year 2010-2012, with funding prioritised for the most vulnerable countries. And a goal of jointly mobilising US $100 billion a year for emission reduction, forest protection and adaptation in developing countries by 2020. It remains unclear as to where and how this money would be raised – except that it would come from all possible sources, (but without any firm commitments from any country). It is possible that part of this amount will be private finance and potentially include financing received through the carbon market.

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