Draft Copenhagen agreements still feature large gaps

Two official draft texts display ongoing uncertainty over targets and funding commitments.

From James Murray for BusinessGreen, part of the Guardian Environment Network
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 16 December 2009 12.40 GMT

The faltering progress at the Copenhagen climate summit was underlined yesterday when the UN released two official draft agreements featuring large gaps that are yet to be filled.
The seven-page text from the Long Term Cooperative Action (pdf) (LCA) working group and the 27-page document from the Kyoto Protocol working group (pdf) reveal the outline of the draft agreements that will be presented to world leaders at the end of the week.
But both texts remain littered with square brackets that contain a range of different options for negotiators, and also feature large sections with no information beyond a note that the topic is "to be elaborated" in the final document.
As expected, the issues of emission targets and funding commitments will be left to world leaders, who will begin arriving tonight and will dominate the final two days of the summit. But the drafts also reveal that a large number of technical issues remain unresolved.
For example, a section in the LCA document on the financial mechanisms that will help to fund climate mitigation and adaptation projects in the developing world contains the sentence: "To [establish] [define] an [X] body, which shall [work under the [guidance [and authority] of and] be accountable to the Conference of the Parties, [to implement the policies, programme priorities and eligibility criteria of the financial mechanism], pursuant to decision --/CP.15 (Finance)".
Yvo de Boer, the UN's top climate change official, warned that there was still an "enormous amount of work" to be done before a deal could be finalised.
Speaking to reporters, he said that diplomats needed to increase the pace of negotiations. "We have – over the past week or so – seen progress in a number of areas, but we haven't seen enough of it," he said. "There is still an enormous amount of work and ground to be covered if this conference is to deliver what people expect it to deliver."
Meanwhile, chief US negotiator Todd Stern continued to resist calls from developing nations to increase the US commitment to cut emissions by 17 per cent on 2005 levels by 2020, stating that he was "not anticipating any change in the mitigation commitment".
The release of the draft texts comes as the EU environment commissioner backed concerns raised yesterday by green groups that loopholes within the draft agreement could negate the carbon savings promised in any deal.
Concerns centre on the large number of carbon rights issued under the Kyoto Protocol and held by former Soviet Bloc countries which have been left with millions of so-called Assigned Amount Units (AAU) that were never used because of the collapse of their heavy industrial base in the 1990s.
Fears are mounting that Russia, Ukraine and other Eastern European countries will secure the right to hold on to these credits, which are known colloquially as "hot air". Green groups argue that the retention of these AAUs would undermine the credibility of any Copenhagen deal by allowing the former Soviet Bloc countries to sell them to those nations that fail to meet post-2012 emission targets agreed as part of any deal.
EU environment commissioner Stavros Dimas told reporters earlier today that he was concerned at the failure to close the apparent loophole. "If we have this amount of AAUs (post-2012), no matter how ambitious we are in Copenhagen, it will be not be enough because of this hot air," he warned.
However, a group of seven Eastern European countries is fighting for the AAUs it holds to be retained, releasing a statement earlier today arguing that any deal "should keep the door open for allowing the full transfer of the surplus represented by the AAUs to the post-2012 framework".
Greenpeace warned that the surplus AAUs amount to about a third of all the emission reduction commitments currently on the table from developed nations, suggesting that the integrity of any deal could be fatally undermined by the failure to retire the excess hot air credits.
• This article was shared by our content partner BusinessGreen, part of the Guardian Environment Network