World Leaders Take A Necessary Precaution in Changing the Goal for Copenhagen
With just 22 days remaining and important issues still unresolved, world leaders announced today that only a politically-binding framework will be developed in Copenhagen where the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP-15) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are scheduled to meet from December 7-18. Representatives from 192 countries were originally expected to negotiate on a legally-binding successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol (commonly referred to as the “post-Kyoto treaty”) at the Copenhagen meetings.
While this “framework” will not include all the details of a legally-binding treaty, it is expected to provide specifics regarding the commitments that countries will make for mitigating climate change and related financing. Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said that the result of the Copenhagen meetings should be a five-to-eight page text with "precise language" committing developed countries to reductions of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, with provisions on adapting to warmer temperatures, financing adaptation and combating climate change in poor countries, and technological development and diffusion.
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF), an environmental group, criticized the announcement as a "missed opportunity." The WWF may be right because international climate negotiations can end with unexpected results, particularly when the extreme pressure of an approaching deadline persuades countries to make concessions in order to reach a deal. For example, at the 2007 UNFCCC meeting in Bali, all signs pointed to failure until key players worked through the final night of the meetings to reach an agreement which launched the process leading to Copenhagen.
On the other hand, while today’s announcement was disappointing, the decision to slow the negotiating process was also practical. Had the meetings commenced on December 7th with the expectation that a post-Kyoto treaty would be signed, a failure to reach consensus by December 18th would have left the negotiation process at a standstill.
Such a delay would be catastrophic. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), each year that the world delays implementing a global climate agreement, $500 billion will be added to the $10.5 trillion needed between 2010 and 2030 to reduce GHG emissions such that the global temperature increase will be limited to 2 degrees Celsius. Further, failure to reach agreement on a post-Kyoto treaty could result in the need for sea-walls to defend coastal cities, additional suffering of drought, floods and famine for the world’s poor and increasingly volatile weather conditions.
Given recent reports that a deal in Copenhagen was unlikely, perhaps treating a preliminary agreement in Copenhagen as a stepping-stone to a future agreement within the next year or two would provide world leaders with the chance to realistically reach a fair, ambitious and legally-binding post-Kyoto treaty.