Dave Raval

I have spent the last week in Copenhagen as a Liberal Youth delegate (through the UN accredited NGO IFLRY). I was in the Bella Centre (until they locked us out for the last few days), and at the KlimaForum (which was the civil society alternative conference also in Copenhagen).

I am very disappointed with the outcome of the conference. What we ended up with was a miserable IOU with no binding vehicle for even measuring countries' progress on their goals, let alone sanctions for those who don't meet them.

In some respects it would have been better if there had been no deal; this shadow of a treaty could reduce the public pressure for action on climate change, and lead us down a very dark path indeed.

As countries' commitments stand, we are heading for a 3 degrees Centigrade temperature rise by 2050 compared to before the industrial revolution. We are already at something like 0.4 degrees. This would, in comparison to a 2 degree rise by 2100 (which is the stated goal of the non-binding political accord that was actually signed), mean 170 million more people at risk of severe floods, and 550 million more at risk of hunger.

And that's assuming that everyone actually hits the targets they have specified in the Accord; remember that even after signing the Kyoto Protocol (KP) countries still followed a business as usual trajectory, and the KP still remains the only legal vehicle in force on anyone (notably, that group excludes the United States, of course). In the case of a repeat performance, things could be even worse.

 

So what went wrong at COP-15? Why are we left with this damp squib of a deal, when we had such high hopes for a binding legal set of targets?

The Bali Action Plan (from the COP-13 two years ago) proposed a format where two parallel sets of negotiations would take place. One was a continuation of the KP, which the G77 developing nations considered very important as it was a safety net that held the industrialised nations responsible for the current 0.4 Degree increase, and was a "legal vehicle" for codifying the new targets. There was a "second track" of negotiations, working on a Long-term Cooperative Action (LCA) which would cover the rest of the world not committed to Kyoto. 

The Europeans and other countries who were signed up to the KP were angling (in the infamous Danish Text) to slip out of it and go in under the LCA too in order to get an easier time. Suspicion that the KP track of negotiations had been stopped in the 2nd week was what caused the G77 to walk out for about half a day - which was obviously a massive loss of time at a critical point in the talks.

The President of the Conference also resigned in the middle of the second week. Connie Hedegaard, the Conservative Climate Change minister in the Danish coalition government (Led by the Liberals), seemed to be working very hard indeed to keep the talks moving in the first two weeks (you could tell by how tired she looked in all her press conferences). There were rumours that the Danish Prime Minister was jealous of the attention she was getting (she has also been made the EU commissioner for Climate Change), so this may actually be time and expertise wasted because of political manoeuvring on the part of the Danish Government.

The other massive waste of valuable time was what happened after the working groups (one each for the KP and LCA) had reported back to the conference. The draft documents were passed up to a council of 25 Ministers from different governments, who proceeded to ignore it for a full 18 hours. To put this into context, the working group of the LCA held its final drafting session on 2 hours between 5 and 7AM on Wednesday morning, but the ministers took until late that evening to even read it. This, coupled with the pitiful amount of time invested by some heads of state (Obama spent less than 24 hours in Copenhagen) is basically why they only had time to draft a quick IOU from scratch, although the other problems meant that the KP and LCA texts still required a lot of work, so one argument is that that was all they could do.

In short, there were multiple problems to do with process, logistics, political wrangling and laziness and that is why the talks failed.

The leaders have given us a token treaty, designed to shut us up for a year. My advice is don't! Make sure you write to your MP  to make sure that they know how disappointed we all are that the conference failed to deliver a binding legal agreement on emissions cuts. You can also write to your councillors to make sure the whole political establishment is rightly running scared of messing this up a second time, during the COP-16 in Mexico City next December.

While I was away I wrote my thoughts at the time on a blog;  if you would like a more in-depth look at any of the points I have made here, why not check it out?