A Meeting In Copenhagen – What’s It All About

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The key thing to understand about the upcoming UN climate summit in Copenhagen is how massively, vitally, fate-of-the-earth-decidingly important brackets are to the whole process. Yes, [brackets]. If you grasp the brackets thing, then everything else is pretty much irrelevant detail.

Nevertheless, let’s do a little run-through before we get onto it.

The Copenhagen summit, also known as the Conference of the Parties 15 or COP15, or ‘the best moment we’ve ever had to actually, you know, sort it out’, is the fifteenth big meeting organised by the United Nations to discuss a global response to climate change.

Delegates from every country in the world will be trying to get a global agreement on how to address climate change. Well, some of them will be trying. Some of them might not actually be trying very hard.

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is the diplomatic process which Copenhagen sits in. It stretches back to the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, where countries first agreed the need to come up with a plan to tackle climate change. In 1997 we got the Kyoto protocol – the current global agreement to reduce carbon emissions. But if Kyoto is the UN climate equivalent of the film Terminator, Copenhagen would definitely be Terminator 2. Happens a few years later, more at stake, with a bigger budget and subtitled Judgement Day.

We’re getting to the brackets. Over the years, many different arguments and issues have played out through the UNFCCC process. Discussion, disagreement and debate leading up to this year’s meeting in Copenhagen has been particularly intense, because this year we’re supposed to agree what should happen when the Kyoto protocol runs out in 2012.

There’s a draft treaty which is 180 pages long and is probably best described as a bit dense. Anything that’s made it into the draft treaty has already been agreed – unless it’s in brackets. In which case there’s still some disagreement. There’s a lot of brackets in that document. Oh yes indeed.

So what’s going to be discussed, and what are the key [bracketed] areas of disagreement?

The biggest issue is cutting global emissions of greenhouse gases which cause climate change. Following the recommendations of the climate science community, we think that rich nations need to cut their emissions at least 40% by 2020, and nearly de-carbonise the global economy by 2050. The level of ambition from rich countries is currently lower than this. What’s currently on the table is a collective offer from the industralised world for a 10-17% cut in emissions on 1990 levels by 2020.

Secondly, there’s money, or discussion about ‘financing’. In Rio, it was agreed that different countries have different responsibilities when it comes to addressing climate change. This is because the richer part of the world has emitted more greenhouse gases – causing most of the climate problem. There’s agreement that we should offer financial assistance to the poorer parts of the world, who are unlikely to benefit from burning fossil fuels with the same level of freedom in the future, and who will suffer more from the impacts of climate change.

So the financing money will pay for a number of things: adaptation, which means changing the way a society functions to be able to cope with a changed climate (basically saving the lives of the most vulnerable); technology transfer, which is money to help poorer parts of the world take advantage of low-carbon technologies; and mitigation, helping poorer countries pay for their emissions cuts and for protecting forests.

There’s no real agreement over the amounts of money that should flow from the richer world to the poorer. The EU, including Britain, argues that there should be a global fund of €100 billion of which €22-50 billion should be public money. But there have been no proposals put forward since then from groups like the G8 or the Major Emitters Forum, or by other major economies like the US. We believe that given the likely impacts of climate change, and costs to the less-developed world, the amount needs to be an absolute minimum of €110 billion of public money a year.

This year, a lot of debate is centred on part of the process called Redd, or Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, to cut the fifth of human emissions which each year come from deforestation. It’s a new area of discussion but already a very complex one, with major disagreements over what the right way is to protect forests. Plenty of people want forests to be brought into a carbon trading scheme, while we believe that a simpler system for paying countries to preserve their forests is more likely to work. However it’s done, we need to have an end to deforestation in the tropics by 2015, and globally by 2020.

Being optimistic and assuming we get an agreement, probably the biggest question is what kind of agreement it ends up being. The best outcome is a legally binding treaty – which would mean that the countries signing up would have a legal requirement to tackle climate change and adopt the treaty measures.

But since the last interim meeting at Barcelona, where very little progress was made, it’s becoming increasingly clear that we might get a much more aspirational political statement – probably with plenty of rhetoric, and a nice picture of Obama holding hands with other heads of state. However, there are unlikely to be any actual powers to make countries live up to their commitments and ensure countries don’t roll back on their pledges in the event of a change of government in Washington, London, Tokyo and elsewhere.

Where do we stand now?

With just two weeks until the summit starts, the political landscape is constantly shifting and slipping – a bit like coastal erosion.