COP15 | News & Views

Copenhagen Summit – Day 1 Summary

The much anticipated United Nations Climate Change negotiations have begun in the Danish capital of Copenhagen. It’s two weeks to go and it’s crunch time for a binding global climate deal.

The Bella Centre is a hive of activity, as 192 countries converge to agree a global deal on climate change. The formal sessions begun this morning, with an opening plenary at 10am, local time. Outside the negotiations hall, demonstrators, NGOs and others are also gathering, pressing on the urgency of a global deal.

Highlights from day 1 are;

COP15 Cultural Opening Ceremony – Short film and Danish jazz legend open COP15. More than 2000 delegates watched the four-minute long film ‘Please Help the World’ when COP15 opened this morning. Thousands of other delegates watched the opening on screens in meeting rooms at the Bella Center. “We have made a film which speaks to the heart rather than to the brain,” says the Danish director of the film Mikkel Blaabjerg Poulsen.

Wave March - More than 50,000 people joined a climate change march in central London calling for world leaders to agree a deal to protect the environment at their negotiations in Copenhagen this month. Celebrities and campaigners joined workers, students and families on a colourful and musical march, called The Wave, from the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square to the House of Parliament.

UK’s Pay as You Save scheme – Hundreds of homeowners across the country are being offered the chance to install energy saving technologies at no upfront cost in an initiative timed to mark the launch of the climate change conference in Copenhagen. Homeowners in Birmingham, Sunderland, Stroud and the London Borough of Sutton will test out new ways to finance whole house energy makeovers under the Government’s £4m Pay As You Save scheme.

UK’s Pay as You Save scheme Hundreds of homeowners across the country are being offered the chance to install energy saving technologies at no upfront cost in an initiative timed to mark the launch of the climate change conference in Copenhagen.

South African targets for reducing the growth in carbon emissions - South Africa has become the latest emerging economy to set out targets for reducing the growth in carbon emissions. President Jacob Zuma said that South Africa would undertake mitigation actions that will result in a deviation below the current emissions baseline of around 34% by 2020 and by around 42% by 2025.

Hopes rise as Obama and Singh commit to attend final day of talks - Hopes of a global deal on climate change were further raised after US President Barack Obama and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced they would attend the final negotiating stages of the Copenhagen summit.

The White House said that the President would arrive for the final day of official negotiations on 18 December rather this Wednesday, 9 December, as originally planned.

Newspapers urge governments to make Copenhagen a success - As the historic climate change conference opened in Copenhagen and optimism of a successful outcome continued to build, Britain’s leading newspapers used their final leader columns to urge the world’s governments to make the meeting a success.

The Guardian used the whole its front page on Monday 7 December to carry a joint editorial being shared by 56 newspapers in 45 countries across Europe, North America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

PM :’I will do everything in my power to succeed’ - Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband used the final weekend before today’s opening of the Copenhagen climate change conference to hammer home the message that there is a scientific consensus behind the need for action.

In a series of interviews in newspapers and on television politics programmes, they warned that people who spread doubt over the science behind man-made global warming risked ’sabotaging’ an agreement to cut harmful greenhouse has emissions.

World only a ‘few billion tonnes’ short of climate target – The offers that countries have already made to reduce their carbon emissions are only a ‘few billion tonnes’ short of the total cuts needed to hot the target of capping the rise in global temperatures, Lord Stern said in Copenhagen as the climate change conference got underway.

Countries meeting at the United Nations climate change conference may be closer than some observers realise to agreeing the emissions cuts required to give the world a reasonable chance of avoiding global warming of more than 2˚C above pre-industrial levels, he said.

>>>Source; Act On Copenhagen

Homeowners in Birmingham, Sunderland, Stroud and the London Borough of Sutton will test out new ways to finance whole house energy makeovers under the Government’s £4m Pay As You Save scheme.

The Road to Copenhagen: Less than 40 days to go

Major global meetings have been taking place over the last month, in and outside the formal UN climate change process. But with less than 40 days to go now, the COP15 conference in Copenhagen this December is starting to come into view.

Last month’s climate change summit in New York showed some gain in political momentum, though a further preparatory UN meeting in Bangkok highlight the remaining presence of a gap between developed and developing countries, seemingly based above all on a mutual lack of trust. The main differences in thought are:

Should a new legal instrument be introduced to replace Kyoto and be the foundation for a binding and comprehensive international agreement on climate?
This is what the EU would like, primarily to bring the US into the new arrangements, but the proposal met with some resistance at Bangkok. The rest of the developing world is suspicious of developed countries aiming to dodge ambitious new post-2012 targets. The approach was further undermined by the US freely acknowledging that they will be in no position to commit to any binding agreement.
Unfortunately there has been little progress on agreeing mid-term targets for developed countries and commitments from developing countries. Norway brightened the political landscape by pledging an impressive 40% cut in 2020 compared with 1990 levels, but in general the impasse remains
Financing discussions for climate mitigation and adaptation, essentially the wealth transfer from the developed to the developing world to finance climate actions, are still focussed on the institutions necessary to administer funds rather than concrete pledges themselves.

What can we hope to see from Copenhagen?

We have reason for remaining optimistic: a “successful” Copenhagen declaration can still be made if the outcome were roughly as follows:

A strong political declaration is made to agree a way forward on how to address the post-2012 Kyoto period, which must include targets and actions
A process is agreed on management of climate adaptation funds
An agreement is made to continue existing and new financial market mechanisms post-2012
A process is discussed that sees common international standards for measuring, reporting and verifying emission reductions
An agreement is made to tackle deforestation through a global international mechanism

There is still time for significant and necessary breakthroughs to be made at a political level. It will require strong leadership and continued pressure from people across the world.