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Searching for harmony

DELEGATES turning up to the 15th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change—known as the Copenhagen conference—face a fortnight of negotiation, beginning on Monday December 7th, almost as rich in complexity as in hyperbole. The range of different possibilities in the negotiations means that there is, potentially, something for everyone, which raises hopes for success. At the same time, there is the near certainty of almost everyone being disappointed to some extent.

The conference has two different sets of aims, which may well be united into one road forward by the end. One set of negotiations is on the Kyoto protocol. The protocol, negotiated in 1997, entered into force in 2005 and imposes targets for carbon-emission reductions on developed countries for the period 2008 to 2012. It imposes no obligations on developing countries, but did set up the clean development mechanism (CDM) by which developed countries could meet commitments by reducing emissions in developing countries, transferring capital in their direction in the process. One track of the Copenhagen negotiations deals with the requirement under Kyoto to agree terms for a second commitment period after 2012, with new and tougher levels of emission reductions dealt with in the existing regime.

The other main track of negotiation is on “long-term co-operative action”—finding a way to a new protocol that would involve commitments of some sort from developing countries. Many richer countries are keen that these negotiations should produce something along these lines to replace the ongoing Kyoto commitments. Many poorer countries are not so keen, and want any new agreement to sit alongside new legally binding (though not necessarily legally enforceable) limits negotiated under Kyoto.

As delegates began speaking, they largely restated old positions. A Sudanese representative, speaking for the poor Group of 77 countries and China, excoriated the rich world’s unwillingness to put up more money for the poor ones, for example. In the run up to the conference, various countries have staked out their positions. America, which has not ratified Kyoto, has offered emissions cuts that would take it 3% below 1990 levels by 2020. The EU is offering at least a 20% cut with respect to 1990 levels, and says it is willing to go up to 30% as part of an ambitious deal. Overall, developed countries are offering reductions of about 16% compared with 1990.

Some poorer countries, such as South Africa, are also offering proposed emission reductions, though they will not necessarily be willing to have them made binding. A lot of these depend on payments from developed countries that will help developing countries to slow deforestation and other land-use changes which emit carbon dioxide. A deal on these payments, which goes by the name of REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, which becomes REDD+ if conservation issues are added to the mix), is a high priority for environmental organisations and the countries which stand to benefit.

The largest developing-world emitters, China and India, are offering cuts to the “carbon intensity” of their economies—the amount of carbon emitted per dollar of GDP. For an historically fast-growing country like China, a large cut in intensity (40% below 2005 levels by 2020) is quite compatible with continuing growth in absolute emissions.

According to an eve-of-conference update by Nicholas Stern, a British economist, the various offers on the table would, if enacted, add up to about 80% of the reductions required for a good chance of keeping overall global warming to 2°C. Bigger cuts would make the chances of such an outcome better. But the provisos and conditions attached to the current offers will make for high hurdles. Some of the most contentious problems surround the hundreds of billions of dollars that poorer countries want transferred from richer ones to cover the costs of reduced emissions and adaptation to the changes that are already inevitable; how much money might be offered, and by what mechanisms, is an important negotiating point. Kyoto's CDM mechanism was not designed for such flows, and may well need reform even if other channels open up.

There is all but universal agreement that the negotiations will not end in a new protocol, or a binding extension of the old protocol. What they might provide is the outline of a deal on most of the important issues that could be turned into a legal protocol early next year; Copenhagen could, though, provide considerably less than that.