PSP policy guru Fergus Green shares his half-time analysis of the negotiations!
An abridged version of this post first appeared on The Interpreter.
The first week of the international climate change conference in Copenhagen began with bogus reports that talks were in disarray due to the slow pace of progress and the leaking of a privately prepared draft negotiating text; it ended with new proposals flying from all directions and negotiators up to their necks in draft negotiating texts.
As environment and climate change ministers from around the world fly into the Danish capital for week 2 (the “high-level segment”), they will descend into a situation that is in some respects refreshingly dynamic yet, in others, frustratingly static.
Progress from the bottom and progress from the top…
Normally, climate change agreements materialise in a bottom-up fashion, whereby countries hammer out consensus on each issue and gradually build a comprehensive text that addresses every country’s interests. As negotiations toward a Copenhagen outcome have demonstrated, this is a transparent but cumbersome process that tends to drag on for years. This process still has a long way to run, and negotiations in the first week of Copenhagen have yielded only some progress so far.
Yet the more than 100 world leaders now confirmed to attend the final days of the conference will need to produce some kind of agreement that goes some way to meeting the soaring political expectations for Copenhagen, even if it’s not a comprehensive legal text ready for their signature. This desire for tangible results in such a short time-frame necessitates a more “top-down” approach to negotiations whereby a small group of countries proposes a complete text, which they then lobby other countries to endorse or modify with a view to achieving consensus.
The bottom-up process has been occurring since Bali in 2007; the top-down process only began a few weeks ago. Both have gathered steam in Copenhagen. On Friday, the chairmen of both of the ad hoc working groups mandated to negotiate the bottom-up process released draft texts consolidating the work that had been done by all countries (much of it last week). A number of contentious issues (including detailed “numbers” for emissions reduction commitments) are still bracketed and placeholders sit where entire issues remain unresolved, so there is still a long way to go. But at least there has been some progress: one of the group’s texts, which was over 180 pages long going into Copenhagen, has been pared down to 7 pages.
Whereas these texts reflect all of the points of convergence and (through the brackets and omissions) divergence between parties, top-down approaches allow like-minded groups of countries to publish their preferred solutions in a coherent document and circulate them to everyone else. A text prepared by a group of developed countries, spearheaded by the Danish hosts, has been circulating for some time, small island countries released their preferred text on Friday, and a group of high-emitting developing countries began touting its own wish-list on the weekend.
… but a long way from a meeting in the middle
All of this activity is a welcome change from the head-bashingly slow pace at which talks have progressed to date, and suggests that most delegations are determined to achieve something meaningful in Copenhagen. Progress has also been made on some of the more technical issues.
Compromise on most of the key sticking points, however, is as elusive as ever. The differences among the top-down texts, the brackets and omissions in the bottom-up texts, and the political barbs occurring on the sidelines have brought the underlying disputes over emissions reduction obligations, the legal form of a new agreement and finance for developing countries into even sharper relief.
The most significant point of contention relates to the commitments of developing countries – particularly the major emitters – under a new international climate change regime. Developing countries continue to resist any binding, quantifiable and internationally verifiable commitments, while developed countries continue to insist that the absence of such commitments would be a deal-breaker for them. The bottom-up draft text dealing with this issue proposes a fudgy resolution that would effectively mean that developing countries would only be held to account for the emissions-reduction policies or projects they undertake with the financial support of developed countries. The responses of developed countries to that proposal were summed up frankly by US chief negotiator, Todd Stern, who summarily dismissed it as “old think” on the basis of which the US would not be prepared to negotiate.
The substantive dispute over the nature and extent of developing country commitments is also wrapped up in a debate over the legal form that a new climate agreement might take. Developed countries want a single new treaty that incorporates key elements of the Kyoto Protocol but also provides a framework for mandatory developing country emissions reduction commitments (Stern would presumably characterise this as “new think”). Developing countries want simply to amend the Kyoto Protocol to require deeper emissions reduction targets from developed countries (with additional issues such as finance, technology, deforestation and adaptation to be addressed through a package of decisions by the Conference of the Parties). Small island states want an immediate, two-treaty solution that would both extend Kyoto and incorporate the additional issues into a new “Copenhagen Protocol”.
Mid last week, Tuvalu proposed that a smaller negotiating group be established to try to bridge the wide divisions that separate countries on this issue of “legal form”. In a move that revealed the extent of developing country sensitivity over this issue, this simple procedural motion was blocked by India, China and a number of OPEC countries. Despite repeated attempts throughout the week Tuvalu, the negotiating group is yet to be established, leaving the Tuvaluan lead negotiator at his wit’s end on Saturday morning.
The scale of emissions reductions from developed countries also remains contentious. This week, countries focused on negotiating the emissions accounting rules that would be used to determine compliance with the eventual targets. Rules relating to the accounting of emissions sources and removals in the agricultural, land and forest sectors have proved particularly contentious, as the content of these rules has a big effect on the ease with which countries like Australia could meet their targets (developing countries worry that generous land-sector accounting rules will allow countries to “cook their books” and effectively meet their targets without reducing their energy, transport and industrial emissions). The aim has been to finalise these issues early so that Ministers and leaders can focus on final targets in the weeks ahead. Australian negotiators have reportedly revealed that Australia would only sign on to the upper-end of its emissions reduction target range (5-25% below 2000 levels by 2020) if these rules are resolved favourably to Australia. This issue will be one to watch in the coming days.
Finally, deep divisions remain over the amount of finance that developed countries should provide to developing countries (to help the latter reduce emission and adapt to the effects of climate change) and the institutional arrangements by which it should be governed. A developed world consensus has emerged that US$10 billion dollars of “fast-start” finance should be provided to developing countries as an interim measure to bridge the gap between now and 2013 (when any new medium-term climate agreement would take-effect). Developed countries have started pledging contributions toward this fund, but they remain silent on the amount of medium-long term funding that would be provided (ie. from 2013 onwards) as part of a new agreement, as do the various texts that are flying around. One person who is anything but silent on this issue, however, is the Sudanese negotiator who speaks on behalf of the G77 & China Group of developing countries in the negotiations – he has dismissed the $10 billion fast-start package as “no finance whatsoever” and is demanding vastly greater sums as a precondition for developing country participation in a new climate regime.
As we head into the second and final week in Copenhagen, it is extremely difficult to predict what will happen. If the first week is anything to go by, there is little prospect for a meaningful agreement. But the presence of ministers and, at the end of the week, more than 110 heads of state and government, could start to loosen long-entrenched positions. Let’s hope it does.
