Rich-poor deadlock in Copenhagen

Developed nations are trying to water down their emission commitments – no wonder the rest of the world is angry

Martin Khor
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 15 December 2009 10.30 GMT

Entering its second week, just days before the arrival of the political leaders, the Copenhagen climate conference is in the grip of a serious deadlock.
Developing countries, led by the Africans, on Monday insisted that the conference place top priority on the developed countries' emission reduction commitments, and on the continuation of the Kyoto protocol (KP), which is the legally binding treaty under which the commitments are to be made.
For a whole morning, the work in several "contact groups" stopped while the developing countries' leaders met with the Danish climate change minister Connie Hedegaard, who apparently agreed that the KP track of the Copenhagen talks would be given due attention. She also tried to allay fears that the Danes would throw in their own new draft for the heads of governments to consider and adopt on 18 December.
Fears and suspicions abound in the conference, and the stakes are high. Many contentious issues are still far from resolution and no one knows how much the gaps can be closed in the next days.
The first issue is the shape and fate of the future global climate regime, which was at the heart of the developing countries' actions on Monday. The developing countries are outraged by the now clear attempt by developed countries that are members of the Kyoto protocol to desert it. There is wide misconception that the KP expires in 2012 and that a new agreement is being negotiated to replace it. In fact, the KP has a first "commitment period" under which developed countries are legally bound to cut emissions by 5.2% by 2012 compared with 1990 levels. The first period ends in 2012 and the protocol mandates members to enter a second period after that. In the past four years the countries have been negotiating emission reduction figures for this second period.
When Europe two months ago said that it wanted a new "single agreement", it was indicating it would join Australia, Japan and others to jump ship from KP to a new treaty in the UN climate convention, which would include the United States, a KP non-member.
The US in turn indicated that in the new climate system there would not be internationally binding emission commitments, but instead what NGOs term a "pledge and review" system. This involves countries stating what their parliaments or cabinets are able to undertake, and their performance being reviewed by other countries. This "bottom up" approach is contrary to the top-down KP system in which countries decide how deep a cut is needed in aggregate, and then negotiate what each country will have to do.
Movement towards agreement on the KP second period has been glacially slow despite four years of talks and the deadline for concluding the talks at the end of the Copenhagen conference. This, together with the now stated intention that several if not all the developed country parties don't want to continue with Kyoto, has angered the developing countries.
The danger of a "bottom up" approach of merely collecting what each country can do is shown by the extremely low level of commitments so far. According to a widely used estimate by the Aosis (alliance of small island states), the aggregate of the announced national targets of developed countries (including the US) is only a 13%-19% emissions cut by 2020 compared with 1990. After counting "offsets" and other mechanisms, the real domestic effort is significantly lower than this. This is far below the 40-plus per cent that developing countries are demanding, in line with recent scientific findings.
We thus face the shocking prospect of the developed countries downgrading their mitigation commitment both in terms of the legal status of the commitment and the rate of emission reduction, at a time when the world is so concerned about the need to act on climate change.
On top of this, the developed countries are attempting to shift the burden of adjustment to the developing countries and in ways not agreed to when the mandate of the present negotiations was agreed to in Bali two years ago.
In the most glaring example of this, the developed countries have proposed that Copenhagen adopts the goal of a 50% cut in global emissions by 2050 (compared with 1990) while they would themselves cut by 80%. This implies that developing countries have to cut their emissions by 20%. However, this would entail rich countries undertaking a 80% cut per capita while developing countries cut by 60% per capita (as their population will double in this period while the population in developed countries will be stable, according to UN projections).
In this scenario, developing countries would have to cap their emissions at very low levels, which would drastically constrain their economic performance at current technology levels. It is true that the climate convention promises financial and technology transfers to the developing countries but this has remained on paper so far. The way the talks are going in Copenhagen, the prospect for future technology transfer is not bright, while long-term finance is still a promise.
At Bali it was envisaged that there would be a three-part bargain on mitigation. First and most important, those developed countries that are members of the KP would take on new commitments for a second period with deep enough emission cuts. Second, the US would agree to a comparable effort. Third, the developing countries would for the first time take mitigation actions that are "measurable, reportable and verifiable", supported by finance and technology.
With the first leg of this bargain now facing collapse as the developed countries jump ship from the KP, and with the US taking on such weak tentative target (about a 4%-7% cut by 2020 from 1990 levels), the world faces the prospect of an almost unbelievably low target by the developed countries as a whole. "We will be the laughing stock of the world come 18 December if these numbers are not raised," predicts the chair of the group negotiating the KP.
The developing countries have the most to lose if Copenhagen does not come up with a credible conclusion. They are thus demanding that those countries that put most of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and that promised to take the lead in global actions to combat climate change live up to that promise in Copenhagen. This explains why they requested the survival of the Kyoto protocol, and the commitment to credible emission cuts by each country be top priorities at Copenhagen.
The next few days will tell if Copenhagen ends as a partial success, with enough progress to propel another year of talks to success, or as an utter failure, with the unravelling of the global climate regime amid a finger pointing blame game.