Copenhagen: a lesson in geopolitics
By Joanna Kakissis
The Copenhagen Accord - brokered at the last minute by Barack Obama, the US president, with China, India, Brazil and South Africa - did not receive universal support from the 193 countries participating in the climate summit.
The accord, which gutted a comprehensive agreement to pay poor countries to protect their forests, since the mass cutting of trees accounts for 20 per cent of global emissions, is not binding and does not have a set date for capping carbon emissions.
It provoked reactions from fury to despair.
Lumumba Stanislaus Dia-ping, Sudan's chief negotiator, compared it to the Holocaust, while Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, referenced the sulfur of hell and suggested that Obama was Satan.
Ian Fry of Tuvalu, the drowning island-nation that has become the poster country for the perils of rising sea levels, likened the accord to "being offered 30 pieces of silver to betray our people and our future".
Global climate politics
China and India, the developing world's rising economic powerhouses and sometimes adversaries, together opposed key elements such as the external monitoring of greenhouse gas emissions.
Wen Jiabao, the premier of China - the world's biggest emitter of CO2 gases - also snubbed 11th-hour meetings with Obama and other leaders, sending low-level aides instead.
Cleo Paskal, a fellow in the Energy, Environment and Development Programme at the British think tank Chatham House, says the world's changing political landscape is partly why even Obama's last-minute brokering did not produce something powerful.
"Climate change has become part of global politics," Paskal says. "There was a very high expectation from the West that a deal would be pushed through. But what's happened is a real wake-up call to how geopolitics has changed."
Environmental groups, developing nations such Venezuela and Cuba, and much of the European media criticised Obama for the deal.
"He formed a league of super-polluters, and would-be super-polluters," environmentalist and author Bill McKibben wrote in the American magazine Grist. "It is a coalition of foxes who will together govern the henhouse."
'Historic, if incomplete'
But, not everyone was critical of the deal.
An exhausted Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, told a press conference that he welcomed it as "an important beginning", while Carl Pope, the executive director of the US-based environmental organisation Sierra Club, released a statement calling it "a historic, if incomplete, agreement".
Meanwhile, Sheikh Hasina, the prime minister of the environmentally beleaguered Bangladesh, said in a speech that the accord was "a reasonable conclusion", and Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, acknowledged that producing nothing at all would have been disastrous.
"This accord is better than no accord, but clearly below our ambition," Barroso said at a 2am press conference on Saturday morning.
"Every leader who was there staked political capitol on being able to win," Paskal says.
"Now they're going to have to go back to their capitals and think long and hard on how future international negotiations will go."
'Climate reparations'
The Copenhagen Accord did have victories, including the first significant climate fund for poor nations. The accord promises to deliver $30bn of aid over the next three years and to raise $100mn in yearly climate financing for poor countries by 2020.
There is also a deal to help developing economies convert to green energy and low-emission fuels.
| ut the climate fund did not win the trust of all developing countries, some of whom say the money is not nearly enough. Evo Morales, Bolivia's president, declared that rich countries owe poor countries billions of dollars in "climate reparations" and demanded the creation of a "climate change tribunal" for countries who do not stop polluting. "That framing is never going to fly, at least in the US congress," says Geoff Dabelko, the director of the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C. "The question is whether these initial financial commitments are seen by developing countries as an incremental step that moves towards figures they see as sufficient." The next opportunity for a treaty will be the 2010 UN climate conference in Mexico City. That may be an opportunity to solidify what did not happen in Copenhagen, though many of the same challenges will face leaders there. If there continues to be an international stalemate on a binding climate accord, countries may try to find regional ways to deal with carbon emissions as well as more immediate environmental issues, such as polluted water supplies, says Paskal of Chatham House. She also says countries should consider sharing information and ideas on how to adapt to global warming-induced changes such as rising sea levels and more severe storms. "The developed world is going to suffer way more severe impacts than is being acknowledged," she says. |
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