This is not any old summit. Poker diplomacy has to end

The world's fate hangs on Copenhagen. From today, all of us, developing countries too, must join in a new, open dialogue
Ed Miliband
guardian.co.uk, Monday 21 September 2009 22.30 BST
For the two million people who live on sandbanks in Bangladesh, climate change is a matter of life and death. During my recent visit to the country, a group of women told me how the 2007 floods had destroyed nearly every home in their village. Such floods now come more frequently and more severely. For them, the instruction to world leaders meeting at the UN today is that they must deliver.
But the truth is that treating this like a conventional negotiation will fail. The route to an agreement at Copenhagen this December which safeguards the future of the planet must be based on a willingness to abandon traditional negotiating tactics.
Some are already saying that we are in danger of summit overhype. Attempts at agreements come and go. Kyoto, Doha, Gleneagles. Maybe a global deal matters less than piecemeal arrangements, they argue.
Kyoto, where promises were made but not kept, does show that agreement aftercare is essential, but it also teaches us that without everyone signed up, we cannot succeed. Copenhagen is the world's chance to get the global buy-in we need. The prize is a deal that means global emissions peak and start to fall in time to keep temperature rises to less than 2C. For the first time in the indust- rialised history of the world, greenhouse gas emissions would be under control.
To achieve this, developed countries need to cut their emissions, not just in 2050 but now. But even if rich countries clean up their act, we won't succeed without developing countries, such as China and India.
They have much lower emissions per person, hundreds of millions of people in poverty and are growing much quicker than developed countries, so they won't be able to cut their emissions straight away. But they do need to take meaningful action to slow the growth in their emissions, in advance of cuts.
The December deadline is focusing minds and forcing action. World leaders are beginning to hear the ticking of the environmental clock. President Obama has changed the American approach, Japan just announced a dramatic upping of its ambition, India that it will legislate for actions to tackle emissions and China is willing to take action too.
So some of the pieces of the jigsaw for an agreement are there, but without ambition and imagination from all countries, they won't fit together. Politics is still lagging behind science, domestic opposition is strong in many countries, the demands of finance are enormous and the technological leaps required are great.
To succeed, we need to avoid traditional finger-pointing and act collectively. Every country faces its own compelling constraints: whether it is the United States, where the debate about climate change has been held back, or India, which has 400 million people living on less than $1 a day.
And yet despite compelling constraints, Nick Stern has suggested that we are on the way to the emissions reductions we need by 2020. His analysis suggest that a climate- responsible goal is a limit on emissions of about 44 gigatonnes in 2020. Pledges already made leave us about 5 gigatonnes over that goal. The world needs to act together to identify how we make the further cuts we need.
So we must be in this together rather than looking for who to blame. The fate of every nation on earth hangs on the outcome of Copenhagen. It is too important to play the cards close-to-your-chest poker games that marked diplomacy of the 20th century. Just as we are realising that the way we do politics has to change at home, so it has to change in international negotiations. Without an open honest dialogue we will never clear the logjams that are in the way of a deal.
In particular, we need to persuade developing countries that rich nations understand their historical responsibility for the problem. They need to know that we will help support the transition to a low carbon economy and the adaptation needed to deal with the effects of climate change it is too late to avoid. That's why, well in advance of the summit, Gordon Brown has proposed a deal for developing countries worth $100bn a year by 2020.
Finally, we also need the issue to be brought out of the airless rooms and into the open. What haunts me is that this moment passes by without people realising how high the stakes are.
That's why politicians have a duty to lead in our actions and explain why this matters. And we need the public to do what they can do best, to move the politics by making their voice heard.
The climate change debate can be frustrating because it sometimes seems to veer between denial and defeatism, the people who say we don't need to act and the people who say we can't. Both are wrong and dangerous.
Summits do come and go. But if the world can really get global emissions under control, we will be charting a new course for our economies and societies. We can't afford to fail.