Global view to COP 15

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also urges richer nations to contribute to a multi-billion dollar fund to help poorer countries cope with global warming which will become operational in January. President Obama said ,I worked throughout the day with Prime Minister Meles of Ethiopia, who was representing Africa, as well as Premier Wen of China, Prime Minister Singh of India, President Lula of Brazil, and President Zuma of South Africa, to achieve what I believe will be an important milestone. Earlier this evening I had a meeting with the last four leaders I mentioned -- from China, India, Brazil, and South Africa. And that's where we agreed to list our national actions and commitments, to provide information on the implementation of these actions through national communications, with international consultations and analysis under clearly defined guidelines. We agreed to set a mitigation target to limit warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius, and importantly, to take action to meet this objective consistent with science. Taken together these actions will help us begin to meet our responsibilities to leave our children and our grandchildren a cleaner and safer planet. Now, this progress did not come easily, and we know that this progress alone is not enough. Going forward, we're going to have to build on the momentum that we've established here in Copenhagen to ensure that international action to significantly reduce emissions is sustained and sufficient over time. We've come a long way, but we have much further to go. COp 15 is lack of targets to curb emissions, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other leaders agree to defend the new climate deal.The rich-poor disputes in Copenhagen that dominated the two-week climate conference and almost blocked any deal at all have almost disappeared after the summit."This breakthrough lays the foundation for international action in the years to come," German Chancellor Angela Merkel told the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag. "Copenhagen is a first step toward a new world climate order, nothing more but also nothing less. President Nicolas Sarkozy intends to invite the countries that signed the Copenhagen Accord to a meeting in spring 2010. One purpose will be to reinstall the goal of halving global emissions by 2050.28 countries that signed the Copenhagen Accord will be invited to a meeting in Paris in April or May 2010.President Nicolas Sarkozy’s office revealing “that Sarkozy had evoked the conditions of the mobilization that France intended to bring in the coming months” during a lunch with representatives from a number of environmental groups. “The aim of the meeting would be to implement the 50 percent objective by 2050,” Arnaud Gossement, spokesman for France Nature Environment, who took part in the lunch, told media. The 50 percent objective refers to the target of halving global emissions by 2050 – a target that has been repeated in many international sessions throughout the last year, including summits of the Group of 20 (G-20) and the Major Economies Forum, but was finally omitted in the accord agreed at the UN conference in Copenhagen, COP15. Meanwhile, ministers for climate and environment from the European Union have met to evaluate the outcome of COP15.“The feeling is that what has been agreed upon is not good enough. However, a step in the right direction was taken in Copenhagen. The issue now is to implement EU’s own policy. We have a clear understanding that we will not allow ourselves to be caught up in a state of climate depression but rather look ahead,” Lykke Friis, newly appointed climate minister for Denmark, tells Danish daily Berlingske. The European initiatives will not stand alone. According to RTT News, Bolivian President Evo Morales will invite countries critical of the Copenhagen Accord to a summit on April 22. Interviewed by Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, the president of COP15 during its high-level stage, Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, says: “The top leaders were taking Copenhagen seriously as their deadline and delivered beforehand. Had Obama not been due to attend, I doubt whether the US would have begun committing on long-term finance – which is historical. Had Lula not been due to attend, Brazil would hardly have raised its level of ambitions. Had Wen not been due to attend, China would probably not have opened to some level of international insight as to what it is doing – which actually is a globally politically significant admission.” According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung the new political dynamics shown in Copenhagen is likely to change the way climate policy is addressed internationally: “The format of the consultations at the UN level, in which every member state can exercise veto power, holds no promise for any success. The balancing of interests between those who want to preserve their standards of living and the emerging economies that want to soon reach such levels of prosperity appears to be impossible. With the global population is growing as well as its energy needs, which will lead to even greater carbon dioxide emissions. Only the most stubborn climate change deniers would say that this is not going to impact the lives of millions of people.” A frequent media observation is that especially four emerging economies – Brazil, South Africa, India and China, constituting the informal BASIC group – unlike at earlier UN conferences played an absolute key role in Copenhagen. “The BASIC group (…) has emerged as a powerful force in climate change negotiations, especially in the face of relentless pressure from richer countries,” Jairam Ramesh, India’s Environment Minister, notes according to BBC News, while adding that “all of India’s concerns had been safeguarded” and that yet “India’s approach had been recognized as constructive”. According to TIME, “if Copenhagen was tough, Mexico City (COP16 in December 2010) will be a lot more so, because there, countries will be tasked with filling in details sketched in the Copenhagen Accord” – but, as the toughness of the negotiations only demonstrate that climate policy has moved beyond hot air into economic reality – “It’s going to get harder, and that’s a good thing”. South Africa's environment minister Buyelwa Sonjica and her two top climate change negotiators said Tuesday that part of the blame rested with the way the host guided the conference. In their first media briefing since returning from talks in the Danish capital that ended Saturday, the trio described an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion that Denmark was plotting to force its own position on other nations. In the end, South African negotiator Joanne Yawitch said, the Danes unveiled a draft at the 11th hour that Yawitch said was "seriously problematic". She said negotiators edited late into the night and came up with a document South Africa found more balanced, but that she felt substantive changes were unwelcome. Her fellow negotiator Alf Wills said the resulting agreement was limited not only in terms of what it did to save the planet, but in the number of nations that accepted it, saying it did not extend beyond the 28 represented at the late-night negotiations. British climate minister Ed Miliband, the UN climate conference in Copenhagen was “a chaotic process dogged by procedural games”. “The procedural wrangling was, in fact, a cover for points of serious, substantive disagreement,” Miliband writes, referring to the fact that China, “despite the support of a coalition of developed and the vast majority of developing countries” vetoed 50 percent reductions in global emissions by 2050 and 80 percent reductions by developed countries. While welcoming the progress made during the last year’s climate negotiations and the “real outcomes” in the Copenhagen Accord – including finance for poor countries – Miliband raises the question of the structure and nature of future international climate negotiations. “The last two weeks at times have presented a farcical picture to the public. We cannot again allow negotiations on real points of substance to be hijacked in this way. We will need to have major reform of the UN body overseeing the negotiations and of the way the negotiations are conducted,” he writes.