COPENHAGEN, Denmark – The United Nations Climate Change Conference ended Dec. 19 with negotiators acknowledging a scant two-and-a-half page non-binding agreement known as the “Copenhagen Accord” brokered by President Barack Obama and leaders from China, Brazil, South Africa and India Dec. 18.
Instead of formally approving the accord, the U.N. agreed to “take note” of it, leaving countries the choice of whether or not to associate with the five-nation agreement. At this writing, 25 nations had signed it.
The accord recognizes the scientific view that keeping global temperature rise to below two degrees by 2050 is required to stave off the worst effects of global climate change.
It also repeated a pledge by rich countries to provide developing countries $10 billion a year between 2010 and 2012 with a goal of raising that to $100 billion a year by 2020 to finance their actions to adapt to climate change and develop green technologies.
But no details in the agreement spell out how such a target would be achieved or where the money would come from.
Even as Obama was leaving Denmark developing countries were condemning the agreement.
“The leaders of the rich countries should come to Bolivia to see what global warming is already doing to our country,” Bolivia’s ambassador to the UN Pablo Solon said in a release. “We have droughts, disappearing glaciers and water shortages. Imagine this scaled up three times. We cannot accept an agreement that condemns half of humanity.”
But president of the island nation of Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed said failing to adopt the agreement would risk postponing for years any prospect for progress on limiting global climate change.
Obama told reporters it was only a beginning. “We’re going to have to build on the momentum that we’ve established here in Copenhagen to ensure that international action to significantly reduce emissions is sustained and sufficient over time. We’ve come a long way, but we have much further to go.”
UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer said the agreement is a letter of intent. “The challenge is now to turn what we have agreed politically in Copenhagen into something real, measurable and verifiable.”
The Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation pact that would have paid developing nations to protect the world’s standing forests from deforestation wasn’t adopted in the final agreement. Even had it been, key sections in the final REDD treaty involving the rights of indigenous forest dwellers, representing a first in granting indigenous peoples legal protections, had been removed.
The next annual UN Climate Change Conference will take place November 2010 in Mexico City, with a preceding major two-week negotiating session in Bonn, Germany, May 31 – June 11.