Climate deal gets a cold reception

Critics say the world's biggest states failed to lay out firm targets as agreement reached is not legally binding.

Barack Obama, the US president, called it an "unprecedented breakthrough", but there were no celebrations yesterday for the last-minute climate deal reached in Copenhagen between the biggest economy in the world and major developing countries. Supporters of the Copenhagen Accord described it as a first step and noted that an agreement is better than no agreement. Critics, and there were many, said it represented a massive failure on the part of the world's biggest states to tackle destructive global warming because it did not lay out firm targets for reducing global emissions of carbon dioxide.

"I will not hide my disappointment in terms of the ambition of the non-binding nature of the agreement," said Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission. "This was a positive step, but clearly below our ambition." There will be many more rounds of negotiations in the coming year, world leaders said. The agreement, which was not formally adopted by the UN conference because of opposition from some developing states, includes only three concrete developments.

It solidifies a consensus among major economies that global warming should be held to 2°C; provides funding from industrialised countries to help the world's poorest states deploy clean technology and adapt to the changing climate; and offers an outline of a registration and consultation system as a means to verify that countries are actually cutting emissions. The 2° target was highly contentious because countries in Africa and small island states view that level of warming as still causing catastrophic damage in the form of droughts and extreme weather.

"This was the worst possible outcome," said Lumumba Di-Aping, a delegate from Sudan and head negotiator for the Group of 77 developing countries. He had pushed to limit warming to 1.5°C. Although the temperature target was the source of stiff debate into yesterday, experts said the bigger problem was that the text did almost nothing to mandate emissions cuts to reach it. A broad goal of halving emissions worldwide from 1990 levels by 2050 was dropped from the final agreement. Mr Obama acknowledged that emissions cuts pledged voluntarily so far by industrialised and developing states would not limit warming to the target level.

"We know that they will not be by themselves sufficient to get to where we need to get by 2050," he said. "The challenge here was that for a lot of countries, particularly those emerging countries that are still in different stages of development, this is going to be the first time in which even voluntarily they offered up mitigation targets." Ultimately, he said, the question of emissions cuts will be answered by technical requirements put forward by scientists, which requires developing states to make larger commitments to reducing emissions. The US will also need to boost its current target to cut emissions by 17 per cent from 2005 levels, said Fredrik Reinfeldt, the Swedish prime minister.

Mr Obama said the accord represented a breakthrough because industrialised and developing countries had for the first time agreed to a common approach. "The most important thing we can do at this point, that we began to do here but haven't finished yet, is to begin building a level of trust between developing and developed countries," he said. Key successes came in the form of a commitment of aid to developing states and a compromise between China and the US on a verification system for reducing emissions.

The aid issue took centre stage for much of last week as the EU, Japan and finally the US agreed to a framework to raise US$10 billion (Dh36.71bn) a year over the next three years, rising to $100bn a year by 2020. The money would be funnelled to the world's poorest states to address the effects of climate change, such as falling food yields and the forced migration of people from areas that suffer extreme weather or rising sea levels.

The rationale accepted publicly by all leaders who spoke at the conference was that the industrialised states that emitted most of the carbon over the past 200 years bear some level of responsibility for helping poor nations address a problem to which they made almost no contributions. If world leaders agreed that aid was needed, they disagreed on whether institutions should be created to ensure that the funds were used properly.

A dispute between China and the US on that issue threatened to end the talks. The US insisted on a verification regime to inspect emissions cuts while China pushed back, claiming the proposal threatened its sovereignty. Mr Obama said on Friday, with a degree of impatience, that it "would be a hollow victory" to come to an agreement without some sort of verification system. "I don't know how you have an international agreement where we all are not sharing information and ensuring that we are meeting our commitments," he said. "That doesn't make sense."

The accord lays out some ground rules for a system of "national communications, with international consultations" that amounts to a registry where developing countries specify their clean projects and are then held to those commitments. Mr Obama called the system a success. "What it will do is allow for each country to show to the world what they're doing, and there will be a sense on the part of each country that we're in this together and we'll know who is meeting and who's not meeting the mutual obligations," he said.

Still, the Copenhagen summit was initially billed as the final round of negotiations for a new climate change treaty and the level of disappointment was palpable yesterday. Environmentalists immediately fired off statements denouncing the accord as a sham. "What we needed was a legally binding agreement that was fair to developing countries and ambitious when it came to emissions cuts and ending deforestation," said the advocacy group Greenpeace International. "In the end they produced a poor deal full of loopholes big enough to fly Air Force One through."

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