COP15 Daily Brief: the Copenhagen Accord

The day did not go as planned. US President Barack Obama landed in Copenhagen at 9:30 on Friday morning, the closing day of COP15. Having arrived at the Bella Center, Obama, rather than enter a meeting with Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, scrapped his schedule and immediately huddled with nearly 20 other world leaders, including UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in an attempt to salvage a deal.

For two hours, more than 1,000 journalists, crowded into the Media Center, watched a live feed from the plenary hall as we waited for Obama and other leaders to address the assembled delegates. The delay owed to the impromptu confab, as well as to a nearly hour-long private meeting between Obama and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao.

When Obama did address delegates in the plenary hall, his countenance and cadence revealed his frustration. It was clear that he had anticipated landing in Copenhagen with the talks much further along than they turned out to be. A telling illustration, one first reported by the sharp-eyed Mother Jones Washington Bureau Chief David Corn, was Obama's departure (there were several others) from his prepared remarks. At one point, Obama said that "after months of talk, and two weeks of negotiations, I believe that the pieces of that accord should now be clear" (emphasis added). The prepared remarks read "are now clear."

More talks followed into the afternoon and evening, with Premier Wen sending emissaries to talk with Obama (a slight that infuriated US and EU officials). At a climactic moment late in the high-wire day, Obama even burst into a meeting between Singh, Wen, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and South African President Jacob Zuma, over the objections of Chinese protocol officials, because he didn't want them negotiating in secret. Obama and the four leaders eventually met for an hour and a half.

In that meeting, they put the final touches on what would be called the Copenhagen Accord, a three-page political declaration, with two appendices to be completed by January 31, 2010 – one to list 2020 economy-wide emissions reduction targets for developed (that is, Annex 1) countries, and another for nationally appropriate mitigation actions of the United States and developing countries.

The Accord, ultimately brokered by leaders from more than two-dozen of the 193 parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), has already been widely described as inadequate, even by those who, like Obama, worked feverishly to reach agreement.

Obama himself said in a briefing with reporters just before leaving for Washington that "I want to be very clear that ultimately this issue is going to be dictated by the science, and the science indicates that we're going to have to take more aggressive steps in the future."

In a statement released on Saturday, UNFCCC chief Yvo de Boer was equally candid about the Accord's shortcomings. "We must be honest about what we have got. The world walks away from Copenhagen with a deal. But clearly ambitions to reduce emissions must be raised significantly if we are to hold the world to 2 degrees.

"We now have a package to work with and begin immediate action. However, we need to be clear that it is a letter of intent and is not precise about what needs to be done in legal terms. So the challenge is now to turn what we have agreed politically in Copenhagen into something real, measurable and verifiable," he said.

The deal does not include a target to halve global emissions by 2050 (a rich country wish); it does not set a deadline, as many hoped, to complete, by the end of 2010, the international treaty that will go into force after the first commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012; it does not specify what legal instrument[s] will extend or replace the Kyoto Protocol; it was not agreed to by all parties to the UNFCCC , and those who did so agreed merely to "take note" of the Accord; and of course, as de Boer noted, it is not legally binding.

What does it do? It recognizes the scientific view that the average increase in global temperature should be below 2°C; it calls for a review of the Accord, to be completed by 2015, to determine if emission cuts and curbs on offer are sufficient to prevent the 2°C temperature rise, and to consider whether the long-term target should be 1.5°C; it establishes a "Copenhagen Green Climate Fund" under the UNFCCC through which developed countries commit to directing some $30 billion over the next three years to the most vulnerable developing countries, and an aspirational goal to mobilize $100 billion a year by 2020 for mitigation and adaptation in the developing world; and it obliges many developing countries, including major emerging economies, to communicate their efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions every two years, listing their voluntary pledges in the appendix and before the deadline I mentioned above.

Most importantly, the Copenhagen Accord signaled that a concerted global effort to address climate change is possible. Yes, the Accord is weaker than science demands. But, we can't forget two things. First, for eight years, including one entire year of the Bali Action Plan, which set the deadline for Copenhagen, the government of the world's biggest economy and second largest emitter, the US, was not just disengaged from the climate change fight, it was actively working against it. Under the Obama administration that is no longer the case. But it might take two terms of an Obama presidency or longer to rebuild trust.

Second, for the first time major developing countries – China, India, Brazil, South Africa, and others – acknowledged, however grudgingly, a responsibility to take mitigating action. It is a fact that nearly all the growth in emissions in the coming decades will come from developing countries, and that countries required to cut emissions under the Kyoto Protocol account for just 30% of global emissions. Without developing countries actively engaged, the fight is lost.

Obama summed up the truth of where we are now at during his late-night press briefing. Reiterating his administration's intention to conclude a legally-binding treaty, he said: "This is a classic example of a situation where if we just waited for [a legally-binding treaty], then we would not make any progress. And in fact I think there might be such frustration and cynicism that rather than taking one step forward, we ended up taking two steps back.

"But this is going to be hard. This is hard within countries; it's going to be even harder between countries. One of the things that I've felt very strongly about during the course of this year is that hard stuff requires not paralysis, but it requires going ahead and making the best of the situation that you're in at this point, and then continually trying to improve and make progress from there."

Justin Gerdes, Journalistic Web Editor

Read the COP15 Daily Brief:  Day 10, Day 9, Day 8, Day 7, Day 6 (Kronborg), Daily 5, Day 4, Day 3, Day 2, Day 1.

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Photo credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza