Working through the
night negotiators struggled to understand the status of the so called
“Copenhagen Accord¹ as the Copenhagen Climate Summit came to an
inglorious, incoherent and fiercely disputed close.
Greenpeace
International Executive Director, Kumi Naidoo, warned: “The world is
facing tragic crises of leadership. Rather than coming together to
secure a future for hundreds of millions of people by agreeing an
historic deal to avert climate chaos, leaders of the world¹s most
powerful countries have betrayed future and current generations.
Averting climate chaos has just gotten a whole lot harder.”
The Copenhagen Accord
is being hailed by some as a step forward. It is not. In fact it has
not even been formally adopted by the Conference of the Parties
(COP). It does not contain strong measures for emission reductions in
developed countries. It is a major concession to climate polluting
industries, especially in the fossil fuel sector which lobbied hard to
undermine a deal and now has a license to continue to pollute.
There are a few plus
points, however, it provides for the establishment of a new Climate
Funding Mechanism and agrees on the need of large scale finance, up to
100 billion dollars a year, to allow developing countries to protect
their forest, to put their economies on a low carbon pathway and to
help them adapt to the impacts of climate change.
Furthermore developing
countries agreed to take both voluntary action to reduce greenhouse
gas emissions and to increase those actions if financial support was
provided by developed countries.
“Even as we welcome
the establishment of the Climate Funding Mechanism that will provide
positive incentives for the protection of forests, we regret the lack
of deforestation reduction targets. This is a missed opportunity both
for the forests and for the climate,” said Shailendra Yashwant,
Greenpeace Southeast Asia Campaign Director.
“Although the fund
could thankfully undermine the use of carbon projects and offsetting
tricks of developed countries, the lack of [deforestation reduction]
targets is a loophole which will see the positive impact of real
efforts to reduce deforestation undermined by national activities
which will lead to international leakage.”
The conference did not
agree a way forward to establish a legally binding agreement.
Although
negotiations will continue next year, the loss of the ‘legally
binding¹ objective made the Copenhagen Summit a huge missed
opportunity. The world now has to resume the journey on the road from
Bali to Mexico where a fair, ambitious and legally binding agreement
to avert catastrophic climate change must be adopted.
