Copenhagen, 16/12/2009 (Agence Europe) - One would need a good crystal ball to be able to predict on Wednesday 16 December what will be the outcome of the UN's climate conference in Copenhagen (COP 15, 7-18 December 2009). Without a final surge of energy in the middle of the night from the world's finance ministers, however it looks increasingly unlikely that the world's leaders will have time to look in any detail on the wide array of lengthy documents ahead of them. Shortly after the arrival of the 140 heads of state, the Predestined of the European Council, Fredrik Reinfeldt, and the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, turned up to find that the talks were well and truly bogged down. No progress had been made on cutting industrialised countries' greenhouse gas emissions, carbon footprint reduction pledges by developing countries or long-term aid for poor countries, much to the dismay of the EU and the G77 group of countries led by Sudan. Not helped by the fact that the world's two biggest greenhouse gas emitters, China and the United States, had each thrown the ball back in the others' court, asking the other to do more.
Artur Runge- Metzger, the European Commission's chief negotiator in Copenhagen, commented that the chances of a grand deal being signed were slipping away. The EU wants the commitments of industrialised and developing countries to be agreed upon, along with a solid auditing system, reporting and checking on commitment outcomes and a fund to provide aid in the immediate term to developing countries. The longer we wait, the shorter the agreement becomes, warned Runge-Metzger, explaining that there were two draft deals on the table, each more than sixty pages long and 'impossible to negotiate' because of the hundreds of sentences in brackets (indicating areas where agreement has yet to be reached). The EU's chief negotiator said that little more than a 'formula' would be agreed upon for long-term funding, indicating how the funding might be achieved, along with an indication of the scale of total funding because no countries can commit themselves to funding for as far in the future as 2020 without consulting their national parliaments.
After tense negotiations among experts and long working group meetings on the Kyoto Protocol mechanisms and what developing countries are expected to contribute, one big issue remained to be sorted out, namely how the work on the Kyoto Protocol whose targets are only binding on the world's developed countries should interact with long-term cooperation negotiations, in which the United States is involved (unlike Kyoto)? The United States has not been present in the talks on the second period of Kyoto Protocol commitments, where its views are put across by Australia and Canada. In order to increase pressure on the US, the EU and Japan have said that they do not want to work on long-term cooperation until the US makes commitments under the Kyoto Protocol. To soften this approach, however, the EU says that it is prepared to merge the two deals as long as the US makes similar commitments to the EU. At the opening of the talks among the world's leaders on Wednesday afternoon, Denmark's prime minister, Lars Loeke Rasmussen, took over as chair from the Danish climate and energy minister, who had been unable to get the leaders to reach agreement. China, South Africa and India, on behalf of the G77, refused outright to consider a new draft agreement, fearing that the Danes would pull something out of a hat that bore little relation to the state of the negotiations. Andreas Carlgren, chair of the EU's environment ministers, said that people should realise that the EU had turned up at the talks to see an agreement reached and the Copenhagen Summit had to be more than simply a new mid-way control point. He said a breakthrough was needed in the here and now and it was time for countries to make pledges, take their courage in both hands and make a success of the talks. Copenhagen must make an ambitious agreement to keep the world temperature rises well below 2 degrees Celsius, he added. Asked for comments by reporters, the EU's Environment Commissioner, Stavros Dimas, said that the situation was fragile because they were nearing the end of the talks. There was not enough time left to solve all the areas in brackets that had been holding back the negotiations and the focus should now be on finding solutions to two or three areas. He said that the ministers would need to reach agreement that night, because otherwise the heads of state would not have enough time to deal with the details. The Commissioner said he was confident an agreement would be reached because ordinary people wanted an agreement and common sense would prevail.
On behalf of Africa, the Ethiopian prime minster, Meles Zenawi, suggested that a fund of some 10 billion dollars a year should be set up between 2010 and 2012 in order to provide aid for poor countries, and which should be managed by COP, which would be launched in the summer of 2010 to fund urgent adaptation to climate change, including the planting of forests, and to prepare emission reductions programmes. The fund would be managed by equal number of donor countries and beneficiary countries. Some 40% of the money would go to Africa and be managed by the African Development Bank. He said that long-term funding should begin in 2013 and rise to 50 billion dollars a year in 2015 and 100 billion by 2010. He said that 50% of this money should be used to help the most vulnerable countries in African and small island states adapt to climate change. Zenawi urged the UN climate change conference to commission experts to examine potential funding mechanisms and report back in six months' time. The President of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade, commented ironically that the summit was busy making new promises to get people to forget the old ones. He pointed out that the most recent G8 summit had promised 200 billion dollars.
The Umbrella group of countries (the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) said that they were prepared to put substantial emissions reduction targets on the negotiating table and ensure a strong reporting system for these measures, revising and checking them as required. This is another area where the United States and China do not see eye-to-eye because China refuses to allow other countries to check whether it is meeting its targets on the grounds that this would interfere in its domestic affairs. (A.N.)