Analysis: Copenhagen's flawed foundations

Monday, 7 December 2009 12:00 AM

Preparations for Copenhagen failed to ensure the summit results in a legally binding deal. That fact will hamper negotiations throughout the coming fortnight.

By Alex Stevenson

Cynics could be forgiven for refusing to believe the frenzied anxiety which has preceded Copenhagen.

Diplomatic offensive and a deal being 'in the balance' seem to be par for the course at this sort of event.

Eventually, though, world leaders always manage to pull it together. They appear, exhausted but triumphant, after an all-night emergency session in which a hashed-together deal has been stuck together to keep the world in its place.

On Copenhagen, the cynics were wrong.

Such is the enormity of the task before them that we already know this crucial summit isn't going to come up with the answers the planet needs.

It will be much harder to refer to 'Copenhagen' in the same way we refer to 'Kyoto'. This meeting of the UN Convention on Climate Change will not be coming up with legally binding targets on cutting carbon emissions.

Instead, the agreement will set up a 'track' towards bringing the lawyers into the room.
Britain's climate change secretary, Ed Miliband, wants this process to be "short and clear" - to take place within six months.

That seems optimistic, but when dealing with international climate change negotiations the only way to stay sane is to keep upbeat.

In mid-October Mr Miliband was explaining to journalists that the task of the Major Economies Forum Britain was hosting was "not to come out with a formal agreement - but to narrow down the issues on which there are disagreement".

Then, he explained, the negotiations were like an enormous uncompleted jigsaw.

The world's representatives have struggled to put them together in the intervening two months. Climate change finance provokes thorny tensions between the developed and developing worlds which will not go away in a hurry.

Grandstanding final deals at Copenhagen might, perversely, be easier to come by in the absence of the enforcing framework to push them through. But this summit will be undermined by its lack of legal force.

There are still two weeks to go, however, and there are many who hope the attendance of major players like US president Barack Obama will make a difference.

Gordon Brown is one of them. "We have a long way to go. But world leaders are coming together to signal their readiness to make climate change history," he said yesterday.

There is a creeping suspicion their intervention comes too late; that the real failure took place in the months leading up to Copenhagen.

The measure of that failure will, perhaps, only be fully clear in two weeks' time.

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