The last negotiating session before the Copenhagen summit on global warming, to be held from December 7 to 18, ended on Friday, November 6. At the head of the international pole of the NGO Réseau action climat France, Morgane Créach believes that "it will be necessary to review the ambitions between now and Copenhagen, otherwise there will not be the consensus essential to the signing of international treaties".
What did the last week of negotiations before the Copenhagen summit in December lead to?
There is no consensus file. And nothing has progressed on the merits, simply because the negotiators sent by the departments do not have the necessary mandate to engage on sensitive points. But something exceptional happened on Monday: African countries, particularly vulnerable to global warming, slammed the door of negotiations to denounce the fact that industrialized countries are not at all going far enough in their reduction targets. greenhouse gas emissions. They finally came back, but they put on a pressure that seems necessary: it will be necessary to review the ambitions between now and Copenhagen, otherwise there will not be the consensus essential for the signing of international treaties.
What would be the objectives to be achieved, and what are the main countries currently committing to?
The IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] has estimated that industrialized countries must reduce their emissions by 25 to 40% by 2020 compared to 1990 to prevent a 2 ° C rise in temperatures. The signatory countries of the Kyoto protocol, which had set a target of reducing emissions by 5% until 2013, are currently proposing much lower targets, between - 16 and - 23%. As for the United States, a large emitting country that had not finally ratified Kyoto, they are ready at best for a drop of 7%, which would bring the targets of industrialized countries in a range between - 10 and - 18%.
The other big issue is that of helping developing countries to help them fight global warming. The announcements on this subject are very disappointing: the European Union has estimated the needs at 100 billion euros per year until 2020. But its heads of state and government, gathered at the end of last week, estimated that the industrialized countries were to participate in the amount of 22 to 50 billion per year, the rest to come from the private sector and from the developing countries themselves. And they did not say how much the EU would put. As for the United States, a country which should be the second largest contributor, they did not put forward any figures!
Didn't the arrival of Barack Obama as President of the United States change the situation on the American side?
If, to the extent that the United States has returned to the negotiating table and now talks of quantified objectives. But they still have a long way to go! They are not in the logic of Kyoto, which the EU always supports, of an agreement from the top: to fix a global objective then distributed between the countries. Washington prefers that each country sets a goal and that we see what happens. And the White House is hostile to the system of supra-national sanctions planned in the event of non-respect of the objectives of Kyoto. Last point: Barack Obama does not wish to repeat the failure of Bill Clinton, who had signed Kyoto but had not succeeded in having it ratified by the United States Congress. He therefore wanted to set targets quantified in a law before Copenhagen. However, the Congress is late in examining this text, it may not be adopted by the summit.
Under these conditions, what is the risk of reaching the Copenhagen summit?
For the moment, we are moving towards a discount agreement. It seems very difficult to reach the solution advocated by developing countries and NGOs: on the one hand, under the Kyoto Protocol, a second period of commitment for industrialized countries, with objectives of reducing ambitious issues; on the other hand, within the framework of the climate convention adopted in 1992 and grouping all the countries of the UN, a treaty providing for an objective of reduction of the emissions of the United States as binding as that of Kyoto and helping by new financing and public developing countries to limit their emissions and adapt to the devastating impacts of climate change.
The EU defends the idea of a single treaty because it wants, like everyone else, the United States to take part. But the most important risk is to lose most of the essential elements of the Kyoto protocol, in particular its system of sanctions. What could suit for example Canada, which had to reduce its emissions by 6% and increased them by 25% ...
Can we count on a treaty?
We are moving rather towards a "decision" in Copenhagen or even a political agreement, which it is not certain that they refer to the adoption within six months of a treaty, which would have the advantage of being legally binding. It is to be hoped that the EU will review its reduction targets and its aid upwards, in order to build a coalition with the developing countries to isolate the United States. We must hope that Barack Obama will be present, which is not certain, and that, if his law is not passed, he will still take the political risk of announcing quantified objectives.
The pressure of public opinion will also play a role. NGOs around the world have launched petitions as part of the Tck tck tck campaign. In France, this "climate ultimatum" has set itself the goal of collecting a million signatures by December 18, the last day of the Copenhagen summit. The objective is far from being achieved, yet this mandate from citizens to their heads of state is essential to obtain an ambitious climate agreement.
http://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2009/11/06/climat-on-s-oriente-vers-un-accord-au-rabais-a-copenhague_1263928_3244.html