ANALYSIS
Copenhagen Accord
THE LOST
The Copenhagen summit failed to
achieve anything substantial – and
sent out the wrong message to
businesses around the world.
DEAL
Danny Stevens looks at what went
wrong at COP15 – and the
economic consequences of failure
T
he Copenhagen UN Climate Change support developing countries efforts to tackle Copenhagen’s colourful housing (above). The
Conference ended amid recrimination, climate change “with a balanced allocation
Accord brokered in the Danish capital city leaves
claim and counter-claim. For all the between adaptation and mitigation”. Longer
open the possibility of endless deadlock
speeches delivered and articles written before term, a far larger sum of $100B a year by 2020 and an association of all the countries that are
the event, nothing substantial was achieved. will be committed to a Copenhagen Green Parties to the Convention – the final decision of
Now the dust has settled, we’ve had a chance to Climate Fund “to address needs of developing the 193-nation Conference of the Parties was to
consider what went wrong. Politicians in countries”. While it is these funding streams simply “take note of the Copenhagen Accord”.
Europe lambasted the US and the Chinese in that are likely to have sealed the deal in The lack of any timescale to turn “take note”
particular for recalcitrance at best, and sabotage Copenhagen, the Accord still leaves open the into legally binding climate change agreement
at worst. The Copenhagen Accord “recognis- questions of where the money will come from, is a glaring omission from the final agreement.
es” the scientific case for keeping temperature and how it will be used. In the past six months we have moved from a
rises to no more than 2
o
C, but does not include Brokered by China, South Africa, India, position of ‘Copenhagen is the last chance to
any long-term commitments to emissions Brazil and the US in parallel to the formal save the world and nothing less than a legally
reductions to actually achieve that target. negotiations of the Conference of the Parties – binding agreement will do’ to one where we are
Instead “parties commit to implement, indi- the “supreme body” of the United Nations just ‘taking note’ of the need to do something
vidually or jointly, quantified economy-wide Framework Convention on Climate Change about climate change. The fear is that we now
emissions targets for 2020”, proposals for risk endless deadlock, as negotiations take a not
which they had to submit to the UN by the end
of January. For the US, this is currently a weak
14-17% reduction on 2005 levels; for the EU a
20-30% reduction on 1990 levels; for Japan,
‘
In the past six months we have
too dissimilar path to the stalled Doha round
moved from a position of on world trade talks.
‘Copenhagen is the last chance to
And we’ve been here before. In 1992 a total
of 192 ratified the United Nations Framework
25% and Russia 15-25% on 1990 levels. save the world’ to ‘taking note’ of Convention on Climate Change. The
The Accord also commits to $30B of funding
between 2010-12 from developed countries to
’
the need to do something
Convention did not include any binding targets
but set an overall framework for tackling cli-
Sustainable Business 1❘ February 2010 2
Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36