UNFCCC COP 15

A small but significant number of the world's poorest and most vulnerable countries have told the United Nations they want to "associate" with the Copenhagen Accord, the voluntary climate agreement that came out of last year's international summit.

So far, 14 of the 49 nations Least Developed Countries (LDCs) have signed up, according to documents published on the web site of the UN Framework for the Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

This, despite some observers' view that curbing warming at an increase of 2 degrees Celsius — a goal of the accord — would not be aggressive enough to prevent climate change from wiping some of these states off the map.

Reporting from Copenhagen

UN negotiators from poor nations are threatening to abandon targets on curbing deforestation if there is no commitment from the rich to pay for a forestry scheme.

"To just have a target without a financial commitment, developing countries see as a trap," Kevin Conrad, special envoy and ambassador for environment and climate change for Papua New Guinea, told SolveClimate at the international climate negotiations under way in Copenhagen.

"It's not that we're afraid of the target," he said, "it's that we're afraid of being left high and dry."

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Reporting from Copenhagen

UN climate chief Yvo de Boer stressed today that the Kyoto Protocol will live on despite wishes from rich nations to dump it. Otherwise, he said, the world would have no legal instrument beyond 2012 through which to slow global climate change.

"The Kyoto Protocol will survive and ... must survive," de Boer told reporters on Day 4 of the two-week summit in the Danish capital.

"There is no good reason at this moment to abandon it."

This is especially true now that a new global warming treaty has been essentially delayed until the end of 2010.

The world may be close to clinching a deal to pay poor nations to preserve their forests, but the current plan lacks any monitoring to ensure billions of dollars are not lost to corruption, a new study released by the UK-based campaign group Global Witness warns.

If the scheme is adopted with no rules to ward off carbon crime, then it "will fail," said Rosalind Reeve, Global Witness forest campaign manager.

The forest text is expected to be finalized by the end of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) summit in Copenhagen on Dec. 18. The chances of monitoring provisions getting in are 50:50, Reeve told SolveClimate in an interview.

As the Copenhagen climate summit approaches, international consensus is building for a short-term financing deal under which wealthy nations would contribute $10 billion a year for the next three years to "kick-start" climate financing for poorer countries.

Today, the White House gave that plan and the summit itself a much-needed shot of adrenaline.

In an official statement, the White House announced that President Obama supports the "kick-start" plan and has decided to shift his appearance at the Copenhagen talks from Dec. 9 to Dec. 18, to be there during the summit's crucial final days.

Millions of people worldwide are pressing their governments to curb greenhouse gas emissions ahead of next month's Copenhagen climate talks, and the volume of protests has increased as world leaders downplay the significance of securing a global warming agreement this year.

A case in point is the TckTckTck campaign, a global alliance of roughly 250 organizations, ranging from green groups to religious organizations to trade unions.

In the span of three months, nearly 10 million people have signed on to TckTckTck to tell leaders they're concerned about the future and ready for global climate action.

"The goal is to get world leaders to see that many, many people want this climate deal, not just the usual suspects," Jason Mogus, digital organizer for TckTckTck, told SolveClimate.

The Indian Cabinet has approved a plan to boost its installed solar capacity by 200 times by 2013, in an effort to increase the nation's leverage ahead of high-stakes climate negotiations in Copenhagen next month.

The plan's passage also coincides with Tuesday's meeting in Washington between President Obama and India Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

The two heads of state are not expected to make any real progress on what they will do in Copenhagen. But India won't get too much of the blame. With its mega-solar plans now a done deal, the nation's climate status is rising a notch. Meanwhile, the Obama administration continues to disappoint international diplomats for failing to commit to specific CO2 cuts and leading other rich countries in a race to the bottom. 

The U.S. remains the only industrialized nation that has not committed itself to a greenhouse gas reduction target with Copenhagen climate talks just weeks away. Pressure is increasing on the U.S. to commit to a target, but the UN climate chief warned that the lack of ambition from rich nations as a whole could still foil hopes of any kind of agreement by the end of 2009.

"Unfortunately, it is not a single country that holds the key to success," said UN climate chief Yvo de Boer (pictured here), during a press conference wrapping up the final two days of pre-negotiations in Copenhagen this week.

An American number "is critical," de Boer explained. "But we are also still in the situation that the targets offered by the group of industrialized countries as a whole are not in line with what science is telling us is necessary," he said.

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Developing countries are expressing deep frustration at the attempts by wealthy nations to dissolve the Kyoto Protocol — the world's only existing international legal instrument to cut global warming pollution.

"What emerged [at climate talks in Barcelona Nov. 2-6] is that most developed countries want to kill KP and migrate to a lower-grade agreement," said Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, the Sudanese chair of the G-77 plus China.

The implications of this could be serious.

Contrary to popular belief, the Kyoto Protocol does not expire in 2012. A Copenhagen climate agreement in December was originally supposed to build on the existing legal treaty — not supplant it.