pump up your life

It was an extraordinary sight: the leaders of more than 20 countries, including US president Barack Obama and the heads of most of the world’s other biggest economies, herded with an adviser or two each into a small room on Friday morning, poring over a short piece of prose with red pens.

The atmosphere grew tense as they sweated over amendments to a text they hoped would form the basis of a new climate change agreement. If they succeeded, it would be a historic deal: the first to bind both developed and developing nations to cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Failure would mean political humiliation at home and ultimately a potentially disastrous rise in the world’s temperature.

The unscheduled meeting took place upstairs at a Copenhagen conference centre where, for the previous fortnight, the leaders’ senior officials and ministers had engaged in increasingly fractious arguments.

What emerged late on Friday night, after hours of hard bargaining, including a showdown between Mr Obama and the leaders of China and the other big developing economies, was a document to be known as the Copenhagen accord . The three-page declaration by the biggest developed and developing countries made tentative commitments to curb greenhouse gas emissions, and proposed financing from the rich to poor countries to help them do likewise. Mr Obama said it was the first time in history all the leading economies had come together to take action on global warming, but even proponents had to admit the accord fell well short of what they had hoped for after years of negotiation.

As leaders flew out of the Danish capital, some senior officials were already suggesting the lesson was that the UN would never be able to forge a treaty on climate change. If the threat of catastrophic global warming is to be faced, some other process will have to be found to do it.

Others went further, raising the question of whether Copenhagen had been the defining moment of a new world order in which powerful developing economies, such as China and India, can dictate their terms to the rest of the world. “This is a change in the geopolitical dynamics,” said one senior developed country official.

Back-room bargaining

Barack Obama’s meeting on Friday evening with the leaders of the major developing economies was perhaps the most farcical event in two weeks of mayhem. At 7pm, the leader of the world’s biggest economy was due at a meeting with Wen Jiabao, Chinese premier, in a backroom barred off from the rest of the conference with heavy security.

Mr Obama strode in, according to US accounts, discovering as he did so that his planned interlocutor was already there – deep in conversation with Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister who, the Americans had been told, had already left. With them were Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and South Africa’s Jacob Zuma.

The US leader called out: “Are you ready for me?” There was no space at the table, but Mr Lula squeezed round, allowing Mr Obama to pull up a chair and sit down.

If so, there will be serious doubts that any world forum, UN or otherwise, can produce a solid commitment to limit emissions, one of the most intractable problems in global relations. Like the Doha round of World Trade Organisation negotiations, the talks risk declining into interminable years of debate while increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide build up in the atmosphere.

For nearly 20 years, countries have agreed on the need to act on scientific advice to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But there has so far been only one attempt at a globally binding treaty: the failed 1997 Kyoto protocol, which was never ratified by the US and placed developing countries under no obligations.

However, Mr Obama’s election in November 2008 brought a new optimism. He made agreeing a climate treaty a priority, despite opposition from Re­publicans and some in his own party.

Moreover, the steps countries needed to take to strike a deal began to look achievable. In the weeks leading up to Copenhagen, after months of wrangling, the US joined other rich nations in making an offer to cut emissions . China and other major developing countries followed with plans to curb theirs. Rich nations also eventually agreed financial help for poor ones to curb emissions and cope with the effects of climate change, when the US swung behind an offer of $100bn (€70bn, £62bn) a year by 2020.

In the months before the conference, everyone had given up on the idea that a legally binding treaty could be signed there. But the UN and leading countries hoped a world leaders’ “declaration” – which could be made legally binding within six months – on the central elements of emissions curbs and financing would be enough.

As formal negotiations at Copenhagen began on December 7, everything appeared to be on course. All that remained was the UN negotiating process: poring over a draft text and agreeing the technical language of a deal. Though tedious and painstaking, this should have been a formality.

In fact, it turned out to be the rock on which the deal foundered, raising questions over the UN’s future as the basis for any climate change agreement. According to UN rules, countries must reach a consensus before any binding decision is made. For a climate change agreement covering many complex areas, hundreds of negotiators had to meet in dozens of groups to work on pages of highly detailed drafts.

But once this was under way, the technical meetings did not go as planned. Smaller developing countries raised questions of procedure, repeatedly delaying discussions of the substantive issues. Some reopened discussions on matters others had thought settled. For instance, Tuvalu and several small island states forced a half-day suspension by seeking to make the talks’ ultimate aim a limit of 1.5°C in global temperature rises rather than 2°C – a limit many countries view as impossible to achieve.

As the talks entered their final week, the wrangling grew worse. Australia was to be the co-chair of a group discussing commitments to reduce emissions but needed a developing country partner. Of at least 10 approached, none would do it.

While some of the countries raising objections had legitimate concerns – “It’s hard to argue with people whose homeland is going to disappear”, as one negotiator put it – the effect was a failure to make progress on the formal aspects of an agreement.

So effective were the tactics that some developed countries suspected a co-ordinated campaign, backed by China. China has many trade links with the 130 developing nations in the “Group of 77”, of which it is the most powerful. For instance, the G77 chair is held by Sudan, closely tied to China through investments and oil trade. Lumumba Di-Aping, the group’s leader, was one of the most confrontational developing country representatives, likening the rich countries’ stance to genocide.

By the time the leaders began to arrive last Thursday night, Ed Miliband, UK climate change secretary, was warning the talks were in danger of degenerating into farce. Progress was stalled on substantive issues and the wording of the draft text was still subject to intense quibbling. Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Evo Morales of Bolivia, and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad chose to use their time on the world stage to denounce western capitalism rather than discuss climate change, which did not help the atmosphere.

After a dinner with Queen Margrethe II of Denmark on Thursday, a group of more than 20 large developed and developing countries held an impromptu meeting at midnight. But key differences persisted as the leaders were crammed into their small upstairs room on Friday morning. That was the situation Mr Obama found when he walked into detailed talks described by one of those present as “extraordinary for leaders to undertake”.

As the day wore on, Mr Obama held private meetings with other leaders, including Wen Jiabao, China’s premier, but his attempts to schedule one-to-ones with leaders of major developing economies, including Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and South Africa’s Jacob Zuma, were frustrated. According to the US, as the scheduled end of the talks came and went, the Indian delegation said it had already left for the airport – although Mr Obama later discovered Manmohan Singh, prime minister, in back-room discussions with Mr Wen.

Within the next two hours, the compromise that was the Copenhagen accord was born. By 10.30pm, Mr Obama announced the result to a group of journalists before boarding Air Force One, pleading snow as the reason for leaving early.

He left chaos in his slipstream. Many developing countries reacted with fury to what they saw as a deal imposed on them by the most powerful. During dramatic discussions in the UN’s main meeting room, which went on as the sun rose on Saturday morning, one Venezuelan representative cut her own hand to illustrate how the blood of the poor was spilled by rich countries.

It was clear by 9am that four countries – Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba and Nicaragua – were implacably opposed to the accord, meaning that it could not be formally adopted as a decision of the UN meeting. Instead, the full formal decision-making body of the UN conference took a much weaker “decision to note” the accord’s existence. This leaves countries free to sign up if they wish, but requires a consensus at a fresh general meeting to make the accord the basis of a new UN treaty on climate change.

By Saturday morning Su Wei, China’s chief negotiator, was distancing his country from the deal. “This is not an agreed accord, it is not an agreed document, it is not formally endorsed or adopted,” he said. “It is prepared or discussed by a group of people who have been specially invited.” His point was that the accord was not a formal UN decision but a voluntary agreement. He went on to suggest countries that sign up might have reservations, and might resign from it at any point. His words cast a pall over the remainder of the conference. Some felt betrayed, though others optimistically put it down to “cultural misunderstanding”. Some supporters of the accord insisted that China, having signed up, could not back down.

Developed countries insist that the accord, while imperfect, is nevertheless a significant step. As published, the section intended to show commitments to curb emissions by big economies is blank, but by February it is supposed to have been filled in. If leading economies repeat the offers made in public, the agreement will not be far from the political declaration the UN was looking for.

The real problem with the accord, however, is that it has not been formally accepted by the Copenhagen conference, which means it can easily be sidelined, an impression reinforced by China’s words. That leaves the UN with a further six months of tough and possibly hopeless negotiations to win acceptance, to be followed by the nearly impossible task of turning any such acceptance into a treaty. It also leaves the world without a global framework to tackle climate change.

It is these conclusions, after two weeks of unprecedented scenes, that have led some to question whether the UN, with processes vulnerable to delays, grandstanding and blackmail by special interests, is the forum in which to reach a treaty. There is talk from developed country officials of pressing ahead with a much smaller group of the leading economies, such as the Group of 20, responsible for the majority of global emissions – a “coalition of the willing” for the climate.

Yvo de Boer, the most senior UN climate official, made a strong defence of the UN as he prepared to leave the meeting, saying all countries must be included in making any deal. If it was restricted to the G20, he said, “you wouldn’t have round the table the countries who are in the front line of dealing with [the effects of] climate change but have minuscule economies.

“That’s part of the reason why people went to the trouble of creating the UN: that people wanted to address problems equitably.”

LEAKS AND ERRORS LEAVE THE DANES OPEN TO CRITICISM

When the Copenhagen summit stumbled to an end on Saturday, one person was notably absent from the press conference. Asked why the Danish minister responsible for the talks was not there, Yvo de Boer, senior UN climate change official, said he hoped Connie Hedegaard was “at home, on the couch, with a bucket of popcorn” after an exhausting two weeks.

Nonetheless, as the summit concluded well short of expectations set by the hosts after two years of painstaking preparation, it was telling that the Danes chose to slip quietly into the background

Criticism of Denmark’s handling of negotiations increased as talks stalled during the final week. With leaked copies circulating of draft texts prepared by the Danes, developing countries accused the country of favouring the rich world.

“There’s a huge trust deficit,” says Jairam Ramesh, India’s environment minister. “There has been no sincere effort by the Danish government [to broker an even-handed deal].”

Much of the criticism can be dismissed as an attempt to put pressure on the Danes and deflect attention from developing countries’ own role in thwarting progress. But the frustration voiced privately by other European countries is harder to discount. Officials say the hosts made procedural mistakes and there were breakdowns in communication with the UN bureaucracy.

Lars Lokke Rasmussen, Denmark’s prime minister, replaced Ms Hedegaard as conference president towards the end in a bid to break the deadlock. But, by many accounts, the process then got worse.

Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state, did not hide her exasperation when she arrived on the penultimate day. “It is unfortunate there have been problems with the process,” she said, without singling out the hosts.

Denmark is an easy scapegoat but few countries covered themselves with glory. It may be that no one nation has the diplomatic powers to forge the unanimity demanded by the UN system on an issue as complex as climate change.

The Financial Times Limited 2009. You may share using our article tools. Please don'