Dear all,
We’re on air: the Copenhagen Climate Summit started this morning - with 41 minutes delay. It was at 10:41 local time on Monday morning when a group of high-level speakers took their seats on the panel of the opening plenary in the Bella Center. Yvo de Boer, the Executive Secretary of the UN climate secretariat, came with a bright smile. Lars Lokke Rasmussen, the Prime Minister of host country Denmark, looked confident. And Connie Hedegaard, Danish Minister and President of COP15, shook many hands on her way up to the panel. It was obvious that they aimed at an optimistic start, to boost hope for a positive outcome of these negotiations.
Before any speeches were given, however, a short film reminded the delegates that the world is watching and demanding a deal. In the film, a little girl is plagued by nightmares about being caught in a catastrophe, after watching news reports about devastating climate impacts on TV. At the end the girl wakes up and takes a camera to tape a statement to leaders about the frightening realities of our times and the dark visions of her dreams. She says into the camera: “Please help change the world!” This was quite dramatic, and saw the plenary burst into applause. Trumpets and harps tuned into the charged atmosphere, and a Danish girls’ choir started singing hymns.
For those who hadn’t yet understood that Copenhagen is about our future, the subsequent speeches emphasized it once more. Prime Minister Rasmussen spoke a lot about ambition, but it didn’t quite feel like he was burning for the idea. His Minister, Connie Hedegaard, chose a different tone. “Let’s get it done!” was the recurring theme of her speech, a speech that was strong and full of fighting spirit. Hedegaard made a good point when highlighting that the momentum for an agreement has never been bigger and might never again be as big as it’s now – an important reminder for the world to grab this precious opportunity and indeed finally “get it done”.
Yvo de Boer went into the details of what he thought should be agreed in Copenhagen, but his multi-layered Christmas cake metaphors didn’t really answer all the important questions. The politicians left it to Rajendra Pachauri – Indian Nobel laureate and chair of the IPCC – to fill overused adjectives like “ambitious” with meaning, reminding the world of the real threats we are facing and what has to be done in terms of concrete targets and financial support to protect people and nature.
And Pachauri was clear that we are facing dangerous consequences, that emission reductions have to be much deeper than previously pledged, and that action now is far cheaper than paying the bill later when disaster strikes.
So for the record: everyone thinks we need a deal, everyone seems to want a deal, and everyone says we can get a deal. What this deal will look like and how we get it, however, is the big open question that Copenhagen still has to answer. And while a positive start with optimistic speeches and fighting spirit is important, we have to turn the welcome momentum into real change now, the change the little girl in the film has been asking for, the change that will transform this planet and lead us into a low carbon future. The haggling between parties that started right after the festive opening speeches – during a discussion about the agenda for the next weeks – indicated that the way towards success will be a very rocky road.
However, the two negotiating tracks, the Ad-hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action (AWG LCA) and the Ad-Hoc Working Group for the Kyoto Protocol (AWG KP), did their job and went through their procedural discussions swiftly and without too much upheaval. That means they are all set to get to work now, to turn around text, to draft our future, to get rid of the square brackets, to replace loopholes with ambition. None of that happened today, negotiators just did what they had to do, but at least no precious time was wasted. And the idea to end Copenhagen with a loose and unreliable political deal seems to be getting less popular by the day. All developing country groupings referred to the need for a legally binding deal in their statements.
There was some other good news, with the US Environmental Protection Agency announcing today that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare, which ultimately sets the stage for regulation of global warming pollution under the country’s Clean Air Act. This underscores the US administration's seriousness about climate change, but the US will also still need legislation to come out of the Senate, for the international community to trust that the US will follow through on the medium and long term emission reduction targets announced by President Obama last week.
France also talked about targets today, when Climate Minister Borloo, one of the few EU ministers attending the COP15 opening day, announced a French plan to push the EU to increase the block’s emission reduction target for 2020 from 20% to 30%. The Swedish EU Presidency announced the same ambition, but Borloo said one thing more: He said that France would meet its national emission reduction targets purely through domestic action, rather than buying cheap offset credits from abroad. No other European country has been so clear in its ambition for what it does inside its own territory, and that ambition is very welcome.
Borloo also talked about increased financial support for Africa and other developing countries, and that this money should come mainly from public rather than only from private sources – a good move that puts pressure on the EU Council meeting of Heads of States at the end of the week. Will Europe raise the bar and finally return to old leadership strength?
On a final note: The rooms at the Bella Center are named after famous Danes like Hans Christian Andersen or Karen Blixen. The big plenary hall is named after Tycho Brahe, an astronomer, the Danish equivalent of Galileo. Legend has it that he died at a fine dinner in Prague, where he urgently needed to go to the toilet, but felt he couldn’t really leave the table. According to the legend, his bladder burst, and that killed him. We really hope that the Danes haven’t chosen this name for the plenary because they foresee a COP that runs over time, with terrible consequences for the participants. Maybe they just wanted to suggest that we should all reach for what Tycho Brahe observed: the stars.
Actually, nothing else will be good enough.
Keep up the good spirit – and if you want to see more of what we’re doing at COP15, visit WWFs Inside COP15 video blog at http://cop15.panda.org/
Kim & Christian
