LDCs sidelined
Bangladesh should lead the LDCs. Photo: Iqbal Ahmed/ Drik News
BARACK Obama said that time had run out to secure a legally binding climate deal at the Copenhagen summit in December and threw his support behind plans to delay a formal pact until next year at the earliest. The US president supported a Danish plan to salvage something from next month's meeting by aiming to make it a first-stage series of commitments rather than an all-encompassing protocol. Postponing many contentious decisions on emissions targets, financing and technology transfer until the second-stage, the leaders will instead try to reach a political agreement in Copenhagen that sends a strong message of intent. Britain's climate change Secretary, Ed Miliband, tried to put a brave face on Obama's move, insisting that it was still possible to reach a broad political agreement on carbon emissions targets. Gordon Brown had pledged to go to Copenhagen to help broker a deal, and urged Obama to attend. Denmark's Prime Minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, the host and chairman of the climate talks, flew overnight to Singapore to pitch the deferral plan to 19 leaders, including Obama and China's president, Hu Jintao, at an unscheduled event during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. He insisted that the Copenhagen talks could still set political targets and outline commitments. "Given the time factor and the situation of individual countries we must, in the coming weeks, focus on what is possible and not let ourselves be distracted by what is not," Rasmussen told the leaders. "The Copenhagen agreement should finally mandate continued legal negotiations and set a deadline for their conclusion." According to the UK government's former chef scientist Sir David King, these talks are the best chance for the world to agree on a new deal. "Once Hu Jintao and Obama agree, I think the rest of the world could fall into place," he told the Guardian. "It's a head of state issue. Obama, through an agreement with Hu Jintao, could be able to deal with some of the concerns of the American population." At Kyoto, the important thing was to agree on targets for emissions cuts-that could later be nailed down in a final legally binding agreement. But even though the deal agreed in Kyoto was a political one rather than a legal one, it still took until the 11th hour to strike an agreement between the three major players -- the US, Japan and Europe. The original proposal for a 5% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2012 (on 1990 levels) was quite rightly felt to be insufficient. With the help of Al Gore, the negotiators managed to get the Japanese to go to 6%, provided it was less than the US. The US agreed to accept 7% as long as it was less than Eurpoe, which we then set at 8% in order to secure an agreement. In Copenhagen, there will be many more players with divergent interests, therefore agreeing on a deal will not be not easy task. However, the leaders in Copenhagen must try to reach a consensus on at least the following key issues for a post- Copenhagen deal, if it is not possible in Copenhagen: Targets to emission cut and time frame by the industrialised countries; Targets to contain growth of emission by big economies of the developing countries, in particular by China, India, Brazil and Mexico. The funds required by the developing countries to pursue nationally appropriate mitigation actions and for their adaptation needs; How the funds should be generated and managed. According to UN rules, for a new treaty to be valid, every country must sign up -- a challenging requirement. The new treaty is designed to follow the Kyoto Protocol, the world's existing treaty to regulate greenhouse gases, the first phase of which expires in 2012. Because the US did not ratify Kyoto, the climate talks have been forced on to awkward parallel tracks, with one set of negotiations, from which the US is excluded, debating how the treaty could be extended past 2012. This new text comes from the second track, which lays out a plan to include all countries in long-term co-operative action. Heads of states in Copenhagen must go beyond simply discussing the problem. They have to start solving. As it appears now, the current officials-led process is running into all sorts of difficulties, therefore it is time for leaders to step in politically. Achim Steiner, the head of the UN environmental program, in a recent interview with Guardian said that the likely delays in sealing a global deal to fight climate change would have a "human cost," and increase the risks of great harm to the planet and the economic costs of dealing with it. He also said there was an "extremely high," risk that the UN-hosted talks would drift into deadlock if the summit in Copenhagen failed to deliver a meaningful agreement. The world has been focused on this moment for years. There have been hundreds of meetings and summits and workshops. If you then take that momentum out you run the risk of entering into an open-ended process, and before you know if it you are in the same situation as the Doha round of the World Trade Organisation talks. There is a "moral hazard in any attempt to further delay action on climate change," he added. "Political leaders in Copenhagen will have to explain in a credible way to the 2 to 3billion people who are living on the frontline of climate change why they could not reach a deal. I believe that a deal is still do-able. But any delay has real cost implications in economic, social and human terms and those implications must be at the forefront of the people's minds as they go to Cophenhagen," Steiner added It is good to see that the world's leaders have awakened, but it may be too late now. They seem to be busy now, negotiating level of emission cuts. The importance of adaptation needed by the most vulnerable countries, including LDCs and AOSIS, and creation of a robust adaptation fund for them with predictable funding sources appears to have been sidelined. LDC leaders must not allow that. They should place it on the table, giving it equal importance with the curbing of emission. The Bangladesh delegation has a stake in that.
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