Chris Davies spent a week watching the confusion and self-interest on display at the UN Climate Change Conference, and wonders what comes next

The optimists have been doing their best; the Copenhagen Accord is a significant step forward, they claim. For the first time the world’s two greatest emitters of global warming gases, China and the USA, have publicly agreed that average temperatures worldwide should not be allowed to increase by more than two degrees celsius. But the good news stops there. Measured against the hopes invested in it, COP 15 was a disaster.

The final report of the European Commission’s chief climate change negotiator, Artur Runge-Metzger, was written in the immediate aftermath of the close of proceedings. Marked ‘Not for distribution outside the Commission’, the hastily written summary hardly reflected the strong emotions and rampant confusion that prevailed at the closing plenary session of exhausted government negotiators. They had been forced to consider not a document that drew strength from their collective work of years but one that had been cobbled together just hours beforehand by a handful of key players. President Obama had quickly proclaimed that it would bring ‘Peace in our Time,’ before jumping on to Airforce One and flying away.

It said: “As the discussions continued into the morning... support for the Accord was growing among Parties and many made strong pleas to accept the Accord, including the African Group, the African Union and most small island states... Opponents of the Accord continued to resist that a document negotiated in a closed group in which not all Parties took part was put before the COP for adoption. Rather than formally adopting the Accord, the conference, in the late morning Saturday, agreed to ‘take note’ of the Accord. (This)... may prevent the establishment of a number of institutions that were foreseen in the accord, including the Copenhagen Green Climate Fund. Following the agreement on taking note of the Accord, many questions were raised on what the Accord actually means. The COP spent around 3-4 hours simply with discussions and questions on the Accord. After agreeing to extend both the mandate of the Kyoto Track and the mandate of the Convention Track to COP16 in November 2010 in Mexico City, the conference finally closed at 16.00 hrs on Saturday afternoon.”

LIMPED TO A CLOSE

So the conference limped to a close with government negotiators confused over both the status and the meaning of the Accord. That it could have been even worse is demonstrated by the summary in the EU report of the last session of the ‘Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-Term Cooperative Action,’ which had previously discussed possible wording to describe a ‘shared vision’: “In the last day of negotiations, there was a last attempt to produce a text that could be discussed by the ministers and heads of state, based on a draft produced by the facilitator. This contained a long preamble with various references to international law. The discussion undid most of the work done by the facilitator, adding text and brackets on all the controversial issues (historical responsibility, share in atmospheric space, right to development, continuation of the Kyoto Protocol, low carbon society). On more operative paragraphs, radical differences of views remain between developed and developing countries. Views range from a shared vision as a guidance for long term action to one as simple implementation of the Bali Action Plan. Discussion on the actual goals (temperature benchmarks, emission reduction targets, peaking) was notably absent as everything relevant was in brackets. Saudi Arabia withdrew from the discussion and shortly after the facilitator recognised the futility of the exercise and concluded that it could not produce a paper fit for consideration by the political level.”

It is 17 years since reducing the problem of global warming was recognised as an imperative in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Conferences of the Parties (COPs) to the Convention have been held annually since 1995 to consider the evidence, develop equitable mechanisms to curb emissions, and to try to agree targets for implementation. The Copenhagen Conference was foreseen as The Big One, the occasion when the bits of the jigsaw would be brought together and shaped into a whole. The European Union’s goals for COP15 were repeatedly spelt out to MEPs prior to the opening of the conference. They were to secure a binding agreement in principle to adopt measures necessary to prevent a two-degree rise in temperature, to ensure that it had the support of all the world’s major emitters of greenhouse gases, and to put in place a mechanism for continual review and updating of the targets and implementation measures. What in fact emerged was a piece of paper that is binding on no-one, includes no specific targets, and provides no roadmap to the future.

Who was to blame? These conferences have come to combine meetings of government negotiators (dozens of them taking place at the same time), an exchange of information between experts (I counted 87 fringe meetings listed in the agenda on one day alone), and all the fun of the fair, with a big presence of mainly European and American environmental activists competing for media attention inside and outside the conference centre. The Danish Government has been criticised for its organisational arrangements, and quite why more than 35,000 people were accredited to attend a conference at a complex that has a maximum capacity of 15,000 requires explanation, but the anarchic nature of the event probably did not detract from the actual work of the negotiators which mostly took place behind doors permitting only restricted access.

Copenhagen was the fifteenth Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC, but it was also the fifth Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol, the eighth Meeting of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long Term Cooperative Action, the tenth Meeting of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol, the thirty-first Meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Implementation, and also of the Meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Scientific and Technological Advice. The various meetings and sub-meetings of these bodies, with their different objectives and memberships, took place in succession and in parallel. It didn’t help that brusque Danish environment minister Connie Hedegaard was unexpectedly replaced as conference president for the concluding sessions by her prime minister, who then lost his grip and retired exhausted, but could anyone be expected to get order out of proceedings like this? It might just have been possible to direct the chaos towards a positive outcome if all involved shared common goals, but in truth they did not. With the UN process requiring that decisions be reached by ‘consensus’ it was not difficult for progress to be frustrated.

The conference became the world’s greatest-ever gathering of heads of government. In this respect it more than met the hopes of people like me who argued that the top decision-makers would have to be present if an ambitious agreement was to be secured. But self-interest prevailed, and the crudeness of the politics was revealed in full. The limits of China’s willingness to address the issues were exposed when that country forced the abandonment not only of the global target to cut emissions by 50% by 2050, but also of the requirement that developed countries should reduce their emissions by 80% by 2050. Some had argued that it would be better to have no agreement than a weak agreement, and with hindsight maybe they were right. It is arguable that the EU should have blocked the measure rather than let China strip it of substance.

There is no obvious path forward. The Kyoto Protocol remains in force but is time limited and excludes key players. The Copenhagen Accord is weak, unclear, and not legally binding; the clause requiring it to be reviewed before the end of 2015 offers little comfort. Under UN auspices the government negotiators will meet again twice this year, respectively in Bonn and in Mexico City, but who knows what will be on their agenda? If there is no forward momentum, there is a real risk that we will slide backwards. In the absence of an international agreement, it may prove impossible to persuade the EU to raise its sights and commit itself to a 30% reduction in emissions by 2020. The argument that such a policy would impose additional costs upon European industry for no good purpose – “exporting CO2 and importing unemployment,” as the refrain goes – will be hard to resist.

Expect new emphasis behind President Sarkozy’s call for the EU to introduce trade restrictions on goods from countries that are playing no part in reducing CO2 emissions. Europe has a responsibility to lead by example because of our high emissions over many decades and their continuing high level per capita, but let’s not beat ourselves up too much. For a long while, we didn’t know that burning fossil fuels could bring about climate change. China does know it, and that knowledge introduces a new factor into the equation. The blame game won’t save lives.

SEVERELY BRUISED

In his report, the European Commission’s chief negotiator admits that the UN climate change process has been “severely bruised” but does his best to remain positive. He points out that countries are supposed to announce their policies for emissions reductions by 1 February 2010, and suggests that this could provide the nucleus for a new international policy initiative. He proposes that the Major Economies Forum, the body detested by many environmentalists because it was created by George W Bush in a bid to circumvent the Kyoto process, could play an important role in “the necessary international reflection process,” effectively circumventing the inadequate UN process. The arrival of a European Commissioner (Connie Hedegaard) dedicated to climate action will strengthen the international role of the Commission, he hopes. Coordinated action between a limited number of countries “with a shared outlook” is likely to take on greater importance than the securing of a worldwide agreement.

These are straws in the wind, and there is no certainty that any of them will develop into the building blocks of a new policy. At a time when the world needs to develop some effective instruments of global governance we are lost in a maze, unable to lift our heads over the hedge to see the whole and with every turn appearing to lead to a dead end.

Maybe world leaders will recognise the need to act selflessly and will raise their ambitions, or maybe not. The plain fact is that our failure at Copenhagen has left us with no idea where to go from here. We shall just have to take advantage of whatever opportunities come our way.

Chris Davies MEP has been the Liberal Democrat environment spokesman in the European Parliament since 1999