The chances of a binding treaty emerging in Copenhagen look slim but it’s not all doom and gloom

Beleaguered United Nations climate chief Yvo de Boer faces a tough task to reach a comprehensive post-2012 greenhouse gas emissions reduction framework in Copenhagen this month.

Already US president Barack Obama has claimed – at mid-November’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit in Singapore – that a comprehensive binding agreement would be impossible because of the short time-frame.

Speaking to Ethical Corporation, De Boer, whose full title is executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, says: “Copenhagen must take decisions on targets, major developing country engagement, finance and prompt start action. These can then be ‘legalised’ in treaty form six months later.”

Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, who abandoned meeting Canada’s Kyoto targets in 2007, has called for negotiators to focus “on the big picture and coming to some agreement on some big-picture items”.

Where’s it all going?

Copenhagen’s big-ticket items remain an emissions reduction target for 2020 and a legal framework and, here, De Boer expresses a preference for retaining mechanisms agreed in the Kyoto protocol.

Developed countries want to retain Kyoto for mandatory targets and adjust it to reflect common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR). Developing countries complain that Kyoto is being dismantled, prompting developed countries to claim otherwise. It keeps the essence of Kyoto alive, says the head of one European delegation.

The US wants a system of “pledge and review”, not Kyoto-style binding targets, says a former Council for Environment Quality official, who stresses the US wants a trade treaty ahead of any environmental treaty.

Deforestation is also emerging as a big issue. Redd – reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation – may well be placed under the jurisdiction of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s working group on long-term cooperative action, says Federica Bietta, deputy director for the Coalition of Rainforest Nations.

Developing countries must reduce their emissions to push developed countries to implement science-based targets. Western carbon-intensive industries cry unfair competition and “carbon leakage” because developing countries are not carbon-constrained despite being forecast to produce 85% of emissions by 2050.

But developing countries are striving to reduce emissions, says Alessandro Vitelli, director of strategy and intelligence at strategic thinktank IdeaCarbon.

“China will take steps to reduce the carbon-intensity of its industrial economy, India is setting up an energy-efficiency cap-and-trade market, Mexico has proposed an industrial cap-and-trade scheme, and South Africa is formulating plans to bring emissions growth under control by 2030, before reducing them,” Vitelli says.

However, until major developing countries agree binding targets, the US is unlikely to pass meaningful emissions targets through Congress.

Therefore passing a Copenhagen agreement with reduction targets of 25-40% below 1990 levels as requested by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change looks, as Ethical Corporation goes to press, unlikely. The former official from the US Council on Environmental Quality says the US is hiding behind Congress in order to strike a trade treaty first.

Similarly Canada’s environment minister, Jim Prentice, told Edmonton’s chamber of commerce in November that the integrated nature of US-Canadian energy and trade made emissions reductions by Canada futile without the US moving forward.

It’s going to be an interesting month.



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