Bridges Trade BioRes • Volume 9 • Number 19 • 30th October 2009

Denmark Issues Warning as Climate Talks Near

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Just six weeks before climate negotiators descend on Copenhagen to try to hammer out a global deal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Denmark’s prime minister gave a frank and surprisingly pessimistic assessment of the meeting’s prospects.

“We do not think it will be possible to decide all the finer details for a legally binding regime” at the Copenhagen meeting, Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen said ahead of a European climate summit on Thursday.

Later, speaking on the BBC show Newsnight, he urged heads of state, particularly the US president, to attend the conference.

“Without the presence of heads of state and governments we can’t close a deal which can come into immediate effect and can be implemented immediately,” Rasmussen said. “It is a direct call to President Obama, but not only to him.”

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has already said he plans to attend the meeting, which will kick off on 6 December. President Obama will be in the region to accept the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on 7 December, but he is unlikely to attend the Copenhagen meeting, according to recent media reports.

The reality-check tone from the Danish head of state is telling, observers say. Denmark, the meeting’s host, has been a stalwart cheerleader of the talks, but with time running out and negotiators still deeply divided, the Danish government appears to be increasingly concerned about managing expectations.

Some analysts say that if the two-week Copenhagen meeting fails to produce a new legally binding text, negotiators may reconvene six months later for a so-called ‘COP-15 bis’ - that is, a follow-up round to December’s 15th Conference of the Parties of the UN climate convention. But even six months may not allow enough time for the US political landscape to shift sufficiently in favour of a strong emissions-cutting pact, some analysts say. More time could result in a stronger agreement; perhaps, some say, a bad climate deal would be worse than no deal at all.

Major Economies Forum tackles climate financing

But as the Copenhagen clock ticks away, negotiators are continuing to push ahead. Some progress has been achieved recently, namely on the subject of climate financing.

High-level officials from 16 industrialised nations plus the European Union focused on climate change at a two-day meeting of the Major Economies Forum in London on 18 and 19 October.

“There are now fewer than 50 days to set the course for the next few decades, so as we convene here we carry great responsibilities, and the world is watching,” British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told the officials. “I believe agreement at Copenhagen is possible, but we must frankly face the fact that our negotiations are not getting to agreement quickly enough.”

But while the meeting brought no major breakthroughs, the officials did succeed in finding at least a small slice of common ground. A communiqué issued after the meeting said that there was “substantial agreement” that “significantly scaled up financing will be important” in any climate deal, media sources reported.

Financing from developed countries to support poorer nations’ mitigation and adaptation efforts is a commitment under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Developing countries have repeatedly stressed that rich nations have so far failed to deliver on financing; they insist that their ability to contribute to future mitigation is contingent on fulfilment of this commitment.

Officials at the London meeting further agreed that all countries except the poorest will provide regular inventories of their national emissions, with the qualifier that such “transparency mechanisms” would “respect the sovereignty of countries.” The communiqué called on G20 finance ministers to “advance these discussions” further at their meeting in St. Andrews in Scotland, that is scheduled for 6 and 7 November.

“There was a universal view that we need to get an agreement in Copenhagen - not an agreement at any price, but that we’ve come a long way and we intend to translate that into an agreement by the end of the year,” Ed Miliband, Britain’s Energy and Climate Secretary, told journalists after the meeting closed on Monday.

The Major Economies Forum comprises Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, Denmark, the European Union, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, Sweden and the United States. The countries of the MEF account for roughly 80 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

More information

A full transcript of Prime Minister Brown’s speech is available here: http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page21033

ICTSD reporting; “Major Economies Forum narrows divergence on climate change negotiations,” XINHUA, 19 October 2009; “East-West divide stalls EU climate funding talks,” EURACTIV, 30 October 2009.