It's make or break time for climate deal

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By Fu Jing (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-10-20 10:27

As the countdown to the Copenhagen climate change summit is ticking, a mounting stalemate may doom a final international treaty to cope with global warming beyond 2012.

"It's certainly possible that there won't be a deal in Copenhagen," US climate change envoy Todd Stern bluntly told Britain's Channel Four television over the weekend. "This is a tough negotiation" to replace the Kyoto Protocol which expires at the end of 2012.

This pessimistic message may be leverage for the US to further increase its bargaining position and pressure big developing economies such as China to accept higher emissions-cut goals as the international community pushes to clinch a deal at the Copenhagen summit, now less than 50 days away.

Fingering-pointing between the industrialized countries and developing bloc still dominates the negotiations: The former committed to far smaller than expected greenhouse gas emissions cuts, while the latter is unwilling to take binding reductions.

Lack of trust

It's make or break time for climate deal

In the US, farmer Dave Eckhardt inspects an onion crop on his Colorado farm recently. Eckhardt says the climate bill before the US Congress could change what crops he plants. [AP]

Representatives from the developing countries said the industrialized economies have already destroyed trust between them, which is essential to achieve a global agreement to save the planet.

This is the status quo of negotiations after 101 world leaders met for a UN summit on climate change in New York on September 22 and injected new optimism into the search for an agreement.

"Your words have been heard around the world. Let your actions now be seen," UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was urging at the end of the one-day summit.

However, actions are slow.

Nearly 20 days after the summit, negotiators made little progress in Bangkok this month on the issue of mid-term emission-reduction targets for industrialized countries. Also stalled: The issue of international aid to help developing countries limit their emissions growth and adapt to the inevitable effects of climate change.

The UN is still mobilizing political will.

"Negotiators have three weeks back in their capitals to receive guidance from their political leaders to complete their work," said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Next on the agenda: five days of pre-Copenhagen negotiations in Barcelona November 2-6 before the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen begins on December 7.

However, pessimism was mounting that a deal can be struck without policy changes at the highest level. "In recent months, the prospects that states will actually agree to anything in Copenhagen are starting to look worse and worse," Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN scientific panel studying climate change, wrote on a Newsweek website post on Friday.

Police in central England say protesters holding a climatechange rally at one of Britain's largest coal-fired power stations in Ratcliffeon-Soar suffered dog bites and other injuries in clashes last weekend. [AP]

In spite of the finger-pointing, emerging economies like India, China, Brazil and Mexico have agreed to draw up national strategies for slowing the growth of greenhouse gas emissions. But they still resist making those limits binding and subject to international monitoring by treaty.

Industrial countries agree to reduce their own emissions, but not to the levels scientists say are required to avert climate catastrophes. So far, while a few countries like Norway and Japan have announced ambitious cuts by 2020, the overall target is between 11 and 15 percent below 1990 levels.

A UN climate panel report in 2007 said that cuts would have to total 25 to 40 percent from rich countries to avert the worst of climate change such as more wildfires, sandstorms, extinctions, rising ocean levels and more powerful cyclones.

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