Copenhagen, Dec 19 (Inditop.com) Hectic backroom parleys to rescue the Copenhagen climate summit from total failure continued Saturday morning, as an overnight plenary session was adjourned for the third time without agreement on whether to adopt an accord proposed by five countries including India.
Despite support from most countries around the world, there was no consensus on adopting the accord, due to objections from Venezuela, Bolivia, Sudan and Tuvalu.
Denmark’s Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, in the chair for the plenary session that started at 3 a.m., agreed to Britain’s adjournment motion when it was clear that four-and-a-half hours of speeches and two adjournments had failed to break the deadlock.
The third adjournment was supposed to have been a short one, but had already stretched for nearly 90 minutes.
Delegates from the four countries called the accord undemocratic because all 192 countries in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) had not discussed it.
The accord had been shown to representatives of 25 nations before being presented to the plenary session of the conference, but that did not satisfy them.
India and other emerging economies had prepared the accord late Friday night in association with the US.
In a dramatic development Friday evening, US President Barack Obama broke into a meeting of the heads of government of BASIC countries – Brazil, South Africa, India, China – and held an hour-long meeting.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and South African President Jacob Zuma were all present.
The draft was prepared at the meeting and finalised with heads of 25 other countries, plus European Union (EU) and the secretariat of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an Indian official said.
“The global goal of what we agreed upon was to keep temperature rise within two degrees Celsius,” Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said shortly afterwards. “We also agreed upon a transparency mechanism that protects our sovereignty.”
He was referring to the demand by rich countries that emerging economies not only take steps to control emissions of greenhouse gases that are warming the earth, but that their actions be verifiable by the international community.
India and China have opposed this earlier, saying this would impinge upon their sovereignty.
Describing the third sticking point to a Copenhagen accord, Ramesh informed: “President Obama said some European countries wanted to negotiate a new legal treaty (to fight climate change). Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made it very clear that no new legal treaty could be negotiated, since we already have the Kyoto Protocol.”
Ramesh said India and the BASIC countries had got a “good deal” that was also “good for the entire developing world”.
But Lumumba Di-Aping, Sudan’s ambassador to the UN, called it “the worst development in the fight against climate change”. Sudan is now chair of the G77, but Di-Aping clarified he was speaking as Sudan’s representative, indicating the deep divisions in the developing world that have appeared in this summit.
That division came out in the open as soon as the plenary session started, with the objections from Tuvalu, Venezuela and Bolivia.
Obama had left hours before that, telling the journalists accompanying him from Washington: “This is going to be the first time when emerging countries have offered mitigation targets, voluntarily. It was essential to get that shift in orientation. That will be the major benefit of this accord.”
Obama said a legally binding treaty to fight climate change was necessary but would be “very hard” to get. “If we just waited for that then we would not make any progress.”
But many green NGOs were unhappy with the accord. Greenpeace International Executive Director Kumi Naidoo said: “World leaders failed to avert catastrophic climate change. People everywhere demanded a real deal before the summit began and they are still demanding it. We can still save hundreds of millions of people from the devastation of a warming world, but it has just become a whole lot harder.”
Kim Carstensen, the leader of WWF Global Climate Initiative, said: “After years of negotiations we now have a declaration of will which does not bind anyone and therefore fails to guarantee a safer future for next generations.”
There were some supporters too. Carl Pope, Sierra Club executive director, said: “The world’s nations have come together and concluded a historic – if incomplete – agreement to begin tackling global warming.”
The European Union accepted the accord but was not very happy with it. European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said: “It’s a positive step but clearly below our ambitions.”
The EU had earlier said it would increase its 2020 greenhouse gas emission reduction pledge from 20 to 30 percent if there was a strong deal at Copenhagen. But Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said in the early hours of Saturday that the union would stay at 20 percent.
