The Cop15 opening cerimony, by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/unfccc/}UN Cimate Talks Group on Flikcr{/link}

Copenhagen: what seems to be the most-anticipated international conference on climate change of the last decades will finally take place after a long countdown.

Starting on Monday 7th December, for 12 days the fifteenth Conference of the Parties (COP15) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will bring together officials and ministers from 192 countries who, under the eyes of some 5.000 representatives of the world media, are asked to wrap up a two-year negotiating process started in Bali in 2007 aimed at designing an ambitious and effective international climate change deal to follow on the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol ending in 2012.

Besides its importance, also the size of this event is likely to outclass historic Kyoto and Bali UNFCCC conferences as the total number of requests to be registered for the Copenhagen conference has already exceeded the physical capacity of the venue, the Bella Center, one of the leading European congress centres. At least 15.000 people are expected considering accredited delegations of State Parties, IGOs, NGOs and media.ro

Big Hope at a Slow Pace

As a matter of fact, massive expectations hang over Copenhagen summit. So far 98 heads of State and government have accepted Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen’s invitation to attend the closing of the high-level segment of the conference, which is scheduled for from 16th to 18th of December. U.S. President Obama, who announced to attend the Conference on December 9th, is shifting the timing of his visit and will be at the summit on Dec. 18, considered a crucial period whenalmost all world leaders will be present. President Obama will be in attendance with a new proposal for U.S. greenhouse gas emissions reductions in his hands as a sign of his personal commitment to achieve a new climate regime. Similarly, the other major emitter, China, has announced voluntary reductions and will not go to Copenhagen empty-handed.

This contributes to generating momentum for the upcoming conference, just when optimism had been softenoed with key UN officials – among whom Yvo de Boer Executive Secretary of the Convention – and some developed country Parties realistically admitting the difficulties in delivering a legally binding outcome by the end of this year.

However, despite the renewed enthusiasm on the eve, given the slow pace of the negotiations so far and procedural obstacles arising from U.S. domestic climate legislation approval process, COP15 will most likely aspire to a comprehensive political agreement that puts countries on a clear path to concluding a legally binding treaty in 2010, thus involving more road to cover after Copenhagen crucial “stop”.
Let’s go back to where the path starts to better understand how it could actually end.

Once upon a time there was the Kyoto Protocol

The Protocol to the UNFCCC agreed by Parties in Kyoto in 1997 commits industrialized countries and countries in transition to a market economy (the Annex I Parties) to achieve overall greenhouse gas emissions reductions by an average of 5.2% compared to a baseline year of 1990 between 2008 and 2012 (the first commitment period), with specific targets by country. However, being the target and the length of such commitment not very ambitious and lacking the involvement of the two biggest polluters, China (not expected to join like other developing countries) and the U.S. (not considering ratification without the participation of the main developing countries), the Kyoto Protocol alone is acknowledged not to be meeting the UNFCCC objective to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere “at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”. The Protocol itself recognizes, on the basis of Art. 3.9, the need for additional commitment periods and targets and calls for negotiations to begin at least 7 years before the end of the first commitment period. To this purpose, in 2005 in Montreal, the Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments from Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP) was established by the COP serving as the first meeting of the Parties of the Protocol (CMP1). Furthermore, COP11 started to consider a long-term cooperation under the Convention through a process known as “Convention Dialogue”, developed in 4 workshops.

On the basis of this, 2 years later at COP13 / CMP3 held in Bali, the Parties’ emphasis on long-term issues to enhance international response to climate change resulted in the adoption of the Bali Action Plan (BAP). This decision created the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention (AWG-LCA), a new body mandated to focus on 4 building blocks identified in the context of the Convention Dialogue: mitigation, adaptation, finance and technology. A so-called “shared vision” block was also envisaged to assemble those elements and other related issues contained in the BAP, covering both Convention and Protocol items, which one or more countries was looking for an agreement on. In order to reach such an accord, a 2-year negotiation process was formally launched: the famous Bali Roadmap. It charges the AWG-LCA with carrying out these negotiations in parallel with the AWG-KP deliberations, and sets a deadline for concluding the discussions at COP15 / CMP5 in Copenhagen. The negotiating process is therefore divided into 2 tracks: one under the Kyoto Protocol, with the U.S. not sitting in the room, and another one under the Convention, significantly including the U.S.

The Bali Action Plan and Why It Can Be Considered a Great Innovation

The great relevance of the Bali outcome lies with the attempt to set a long-term goal for emission reductions for the very first time in the UNFCCC process, thus giving a new role to the developing countries now implicitly involved in the common action to tackle climate change. The BAP, in fact, unlike the Berlin Mandate (that in 1995 launched the talks that led to the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol) does not rule out new commitments for them, rather it calls for “measurable, reportable and verifiable nationally appropriate mitigation actions”. Also, it avoids discussing numerical targets for industrialized countries, calling for mitigation actions or commitments including “quantified emission limitation and reduction objectives” that will ensure “comparability of efforts” among them and taking into account “differences in their national circumstances”. The Bali Roadmap has hence the merit for having indicated a way to all the Parties to overcome divergences on the key issues and respond to the climate challenge with the urgency acknowledged by the scientific community according to the latest findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report.

It is important to recall what the Panel’s conclusions are: the risks of dangerous climate change impacts rise sharply as planetary warming exceeds 2°C from pre-industrial levels. To have any reasonable chance of avoiding that, global CO2 concentrations must be kept substantially below a doubling from pre-industrial levels, which were approximately 280 parts per million (ppm). At present, concentrations are estimated being around 383 ppm and growing at an ever-increasing rate of about 2 ppm a year. According to IPCC, stabilizing at a 2°C to 2.4°C warming requires stabilizing CO2 emissions in the range of 350-400 ppm (or 445-495 ppm CO2-equivalent), and it is possible to lay out medium- and long-term targets for a variety of stabilization ranges for both developed developing countries. For a low stabilization level of 450 ppm CO2-eq, Annex I countries need to hit a target of 25% to 40% emission cuts by 2020 and of 80% to 95% by 2050 from 1990 levels, with non-Annex I Parties also making substantial reductions. Yet, the majority of future growth in greenhouse gas emissions is projected to come from developing countries, notably China and India, as well as Brazil, Mexico and South Africa, if no changes are made by governments to existing energy policies and measures.

In the light of this, the ambition of a Copenhagen agreement is to achieve what Kyoto failed to: a global treaty operational by 2012 and engaging all countries, including major emitters, involving a long-term shared vision based on sound science. This would mean envisaging higher emission cuts for industrialized countries through flexible mechanism, such as an enhanced carbon-market, and at the same time creating incentives for limiting emissions in developing countries, assuring streams of finance to cover the additional costs of adopting lower-carbon development pathways and of adapting to unavoidable impacts of climate change, with special reference to most vulnerable countries.

Steps of a Long Way

On the way to Copenhagen, both the AWG-KP and the AWG-LCA met four times in 2008 and held an exceptionally tough agenda of consultations throughout 2009:

• 31 March – 4 April 2008, Bangkok (AWG-LCA1, first part of AWG-KP5)
• 2 – 13 June 2008, Bonn (AWG-LCA2, second part of AWG-KP5)
• 21-27 August 2008, Accra (AWG-LCA3, first part of AWG-KP6)
• 1-12 December 2008, Poznań (COP14, CMP4, AWG-LCA4, second part of AWG-KP6)
• 29 March – 8 April 2009, Bonn (AWG-LCA5, AWG-KP7)
• 1-14 June 2009, Bonn (SBI30, SBSTA30, AWG-LCA6, AWG-KP8)
• 10-14 August 2009, Bonn (informal AWG-LCA and AWG-KP)
• 28 September – 9 October 2009, Bangkok (first part of AWG-LCA7, first part of AWG-KP9)
• 2-6 November 2009, Barcelona (second part of AWG-LCA7, second part of AWG-KP9)

Last year in Poznań, COP14 took stock of the accelerated negotiating process. This year, the June session convened in Bonn produced a negotiating text on the basis of a AWG-LCA Chair’s proposal, covering all elements of the BAP, which turned up to be nearly 200 pages long, full of contradictory draft clauses and some 2.000 square brackets, the punctuation used by negotiators to mark unsettled points. Since this text represents the ground for the future agreement, the following consultation rounds aimed at streamlining it through the production of a number of non-papers, reading guides, tables and other instruments that could help make issues converge in a more manageable text.

All the Documents Are on The Table

Now, on the table of Copenhagen negotiators will find all the documentation produced so far. Some progress has been made especially in terms of adaptation, technology development and transfer, and capacity building provisions in favour of developing countries. On finance less evident steps forward have been taken, whilst a deal for a significantly scaled-up public and private financial support, including a “fast start” financing package for prompt action pre-2013, is considered essential to the final agreement. Developing countries are particularly concerned with public sources being rebranded as climate-related, thus resulting in no additional funding for them; moreover, sources coming from carbon markets are feared to involve volatility thus affecting the actual support.

On the other hand, the issue of mitigation is still largely unresolved. Developing country Parties blame industrialized countries for trying to “kill the Kyoto Protocol” and demand the two negotiating tracks to be maintained apart, aiming at amending the Protocol (which does not imply any commitment for non-Annex I Parties) and having a new treaty under the Convention. They call for very ambitious long-term and mid-term reduction objectives (40%-45% by 2020 compared to 1990 levels) to be undertaken by Annex I Parties along with a binding compliance system, whereas big emerging emitters are willing to commit themselves only against a clear financial support for their mitigation actions, without any international review process.

To date, the European Union has proposed a 20% cut and it is ready to move to a 30% reduction compared to 1990 levels if a global deal is achieved. Japan has promised a 25% reduction in emissions by 2020 according to 1990 levels. The U.S. has recently offered a cut in the range of 17% from 2005 levels by 2020, but it seems a rather empty promise since it has been calculated to be equal to a reduction of 3.39% compared to 1990 levels. This proposal is less than a half of the original potential American commitment: if the U.S. had ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 its reduction target would have been of 7% from 1990 levels. Nevertheless, this number is in line with the U.S. House of Representatives’ Waxman-Markey climate bill, which was approved in June and has been placed on calendar for the Senate’s consideration, possibly in springtime next year. China too announced modest plans to curb its emissions amounting to 40%-45% by 2020 on 2005 level. Similarly India has reviewed its position and pledged to cut its emission by 20%-25% by 2020 on a baseline of 2005, but just as voluntary commitment making clear that no legally binding target will be accepted.

Indeed, the conference is expected to be slow and extremely delicate, and negotiators know they will have a hard time ahead. Concerning the possible Copenhagen conclusion, a primary reason of ambiguity can be found in the BAP itself: it mentions an outcome to be agreed and a decision to be adopted at COP15, but it does not define the legal nature of the outcome. Given the current state of play, a legally binding instrument will not be easily achieved. Most likely a “politically binding” agreement in the form of a set of COP decisions will be sealed, containing provisions on mitigation individual and aggregated goals for developed countries, nationally appropriate mitigation actions by developing countries, indications for launching fast start finance for immediate action and possibly a burden sharing agreement, as well as a series of additional resolutions on finance, technology, adaptation and capacity building.

In this context, the COP must also set out the mandate of the AWG-LCA to continue working on the details covered by the specific decisions to turn these into a legally binding treaty. This is rumoured to be happening at COP15-bis scheduled for June 2010 in Bonn or, at the latest, at COP16 at the end of next year in Mexico City. One of the reasons for further delaying this could be the U.S. domestic climate act not being accepted by the Congress, thus hampering U.S. participation in an ambitious global climate regime.
Definitely, the road from Bali is not really over in Copenhagen.