Copenhagen, Dec 18 (DPA) US President Barack Obama arrived in Copenhagen Friday, raising hopes of a deal on the final day of key United Nations talks aimed at preventing climate change.
Obama landed at Kastrup Airport at 9 a.m. and headed straight for the nearby Bella Center venue, where he was to hold bilateral talks with a handful of world leaders – among them Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and the meeting’s host, Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen.
An agreement between China and the US, who together account for nearly half of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, is seen as crucial for a deal which seeks to limit global warming to within 2 degrees centigrade against pre-industrial levels.
Tensions between China and developed countries have re-surfaced in the run-up to the final day, with overnight talks proving “very difficult”, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt told Swedish broadcaster SVT.
“This is not a discussion where rich countries are against poor ones: there is a group with big responsibility, fast-growing economies with big emissions. There is a group which is not constructive,” Reinfeldt said.
But the chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, said he had registered encouraging signs from China, which Europeans see as the most troublesome naysayer, along with the US and India.
“China appears to be more helpful. What that means exactly, we’ll see today,” the Nobel Peace prize winner told DPA.
Obama’s presence also improved the prospects of a deal after rumours began circulating in Copenhagen that the president might reconsider the trip.
The around 120 national delegations present in Copenhagen since Dec 7 have been at odds over both issues of substance, such as emission cut levels and funding to poor nations, and of form.
One line of thinking says leaders should thrash two separate international agreements: one to update the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, which covers states such as Germany and Russia, and another to draw up a separate deal covering non-Kyoto states such as the US and China.
Another calls for a separate “umbrella declaration” which would set out the main points of an accord on both technical texts.
The latter view was backed overnight by a group of 26 of the world’s most powerful nations, including the US, China, India, Brazil and Mexico, as well as European and African nations.
Their idea is to simplify and speed up the highly complex negotiations on the last, critical day.
But with negotiators having been unable to make any progress overnight, it was up to world leaders to hammer out a deal during the final hours of talks.
