COPENHAGEN: The UN climate conference narrowly escaped collapse Saturday as bitterly divided delegates agreed after all-night talks to recognize a political compromise that US President Barack Obama brokered with China and other emerging powers.
The Copenhagen Accord was bogged down for hours by protests from delegates who felt they were excluded from the process or said the deal didn’t go far enough in cutting the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.
After a break, the conference president gaveled a decision to “take note” of the agreement instead of formally approving it. Experts said that clears the way for the accord to begin even though it was not formally approved by the conference.
“We have a deal in Copenhagen,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said.
Disputes between rich and poor countries and between the world’s biggest carbon polluters — China and the US — dominated the two-week conference. Obama’s day of hectic diplomacy produced a document promising $30 billion in emergency climate aid to poor nations in the next three years and a goal of eventually channeling $100 billion a year by 2020 to developing countries. It includes a method for verifying each nation’s reductions of heat-trapping gases.
It requires industrial countries to list their individual targets and developing countries to list what actions they will take to cut global warming pollution by specific amounts. Obama called that an “unprecedented breakthrough.”
The document said carbon emissions should be reduced enough to keep the increase in average global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius, but it omits the usual reference to pre-industrial levels. Without that language, the starting point for limiting temperatures would be 0.7 Celsius higher — the amount of warming in modern times.
The overall outcome was a significant disappointment to those who had anticipated the deal brokered by Obama would be turned into a legally binding treaty. Instead, it envisions another year of negotiations and leaves myriad details yet to be decided.
