COP15

Reporting from London

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change would be far more effective if it relied more on smaller, representative groups of countries meeting year-round to hammer out the details of a future climate agreement, Britain’s climate change secretary, Ed Miliband, told Parliament.

He also suggested that the leadership of the UNFCCC’s annual Conference of Parties meetings needs an overhaul — instead of career politicians leading the way toward an international agreement, the COP needs diplomatic and climate change experts at the helm.

Reporting from London

International policy experts discussing the future of climate change policy said they aren’t optimistic about achieving a comprehensive legally binding agreement at the COP16 meeting late this year in Mexico, and they’re not too optimistic about COP17 in South Africa in 2011 either.

The problem seems to be that trust between developed and developing countries was severed at Copenhagen in December during the last big meeting of the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

“For Mexico to succeed, a few issues have to be addressed. The main one will be the building of trust,” Bruno Sekoli, chief negotiator for Lesotho and the COP15 chair for the least-developed countries group, said at a forum held Thursday by the Foundation for International Environmental Law and Development (FIELD) at London’s Institute for Physics.

“I do feel that Mexico may be too soon for us to reach a legally binding [agreement], we need maybe a little bit more time,” he said. “Damage from 2009 will take sometime to heal.”

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Yvo de Boer's resignation as UN climate chief has left developing country advocates both hopeful and uneasy over the future of global warming negotiations that have been thrown into disarray by a rich-poor rift.

The world is losing a tireless advocate for a new UN climate treaty, advocacy groups say, but some also argue that fresh leadership could spur a reversal of the deterioration that has characterized talks lately.

"De Boer is only an executive, and the impact of changing him is similar to a change of an executive in any organization,” said Wael Hmaidan, executive director of Lebanon-based IndyACT who has been involved in the UN climate negotiations since 1999. "It depends on who replaces de Boer. Maybe it will have a positive impact."

The key is finding a person who is "trusted by all," Hmaidan told SolveClimate, adding that "trust is missing in the secretariat by developing countries."

Over the next few weeks, leading nations will be deciding the fate of the Copenhagen Accord, the three-page climate change agreement recognized at last month’s international summit but never adopted.

If they embrace it, they’ll also be embracing a process that sidestepped one the highest procedural hurdles of the UN system, unanimous consent.

It’s been weeks since the Copenhagen climate talks ended, and the blame game hasn’t dulled but become more shrill. In all the finger pointing, one thing that has been lacking is consideration that achievement of a binding legal deal on climate change may be better served under the skies of a gritty, dynamic urban center in an emerging market country than a pristine old world capital.

In Mexico City, where the Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC meets again in late November with hopes of this time reaching a legally binding climate accord, developed countries will not so easily be able to ignore the pressure climate change will place on a majority of the world’s population — a population that is more cramped for space and has less wealth per capita than the people of major cities in developed countries around the world.

The Kyoto Protocol, the world's only legal agreement to fight global warming, survived Copenhagen but its future remains very much in doubt.

The treaty, which binds 37 nations to emissions cuts, is still "an active agreement," but it appears "to be on life support," Erich Pica, executive director of Friends of the Earth USA, told SolveClimate.

The Dec. 7-18 Copenhagen talks failed to resolve the rich-poor impasse over the 1997 protocol.

Instead, the world agreed to "continue its work" on Kyoto until the next climate conference in Mexico in December 2010 — leaving open the possibility of downgrading or replacing it less than a year from now.

The climate accord announcement is legitimately catching some heat for being too little, too late. The enormity of the crisis cries out for strong binding pollution reduction targets by all countries and massive infusions of public and private capital to catalyze a fast-track transition to a low-carbon economy.

But expecting we’d get all this at COP15 was never realistic. That’s why leading U.S. businesses such as Nike, PG&E and North Face are encouraged by these first positive steps from Copenhagen.

Reporting from Copenhagen

“Takes note of: That is a way of recognizing what is there without going so far as to directly associate yourself with it.”

That's how UN climate chief Yvo de Boer described the fate of the Copenhagen Accord this morning. World leaders had hammered out what they thought was an international climate change agreement, only to watch the Sudanese speaker for the G77, Lumumba Di-Aping, shred it in 20 minutes during a midnight press conference.

With unanimous approval of the accord out of the question, officials came up with this solution: The Conference of Parties "took note" of the Copenhagen Accord but did not formally adopt it.

How the non-binding Copenhagen Accord will function from here, particularly its financial mechanisms, is unclear, legal experts say. While recognized, it exists outside of all previous agreements, and only those countries that explicitly associate with the accord are bound to it in any way.

Reporting from Copenhagen

A new global warming pact, heralded by U.S. President Barack Obama as "an important milestone" and considered a done deal late Friday night, unraveled in the wee hours of Saturday morning, even though the world's biggest carbon polluters supported it.

The U.S. president had landed in snow-covered Copenhagen around 9 a.m. Friday, joining the tail end of critical two-week climate talks to help break a deadlock and broker a deal.

Reporting from Copenhagen

U.S. President Barack Obama called on the world today to adopt a three-part framework of mitigation, transparency and financing to unclog global climate change talks in Copenhagen. He warned in the summit's final hours that "our ability to take collective action is in doubt and hangs in the balance."

The plan offers "a clear formula — one that embraces the principle of common but differentiated responses and respective capabilities," Obama said, referring to a UN principle that developing nations frequently point to in calling for greater emissions cuts and concessions from developed nations.

"It adds up to a significant accord — one that takes us farther than we have ever gone before as an international community," Obama said. He called it America's "bottom line."

"We can embrace this accord, take a substantial step forward, and continue to refine it and build upon its foundation ... or we can again choose delay," he said.

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