The one step forward, two steps back story of the Copenhagen climate change conference continued on Friday as African countries took the lead on behalf of the developing world to force a suspension of negotiations to protest the lack of progress in finalizing emissions reduction targets for the rich countries beyond 2012.
Alleging a planned effort by rich countries to sign the ‘death of Kyoto’ in Copenhagen, the African group, supported by India, China and others in the Group of 77, threatened to walk out and block all negotiations till the emission cuts for developed countries for the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol were finalized.
The protests forced conference president Connie Hedegaard, who is the energy and climate minister of Denmark, to call an informal meeting of environment ministers to resolve the deadlock. They were huddled in the meeting room till late in the evening.
“The African countries are of the view that while a lot of discussions have taken place on what the long-term strategy of the world should be to tackle climate change, the immediate issues relating to emission cuts for the rich countries are being ignored,” said an Indian negotiator.
Negotiations at Copenhagen are taking place on two parallel tracks, as mandated by the Bali Action Plan. One is to finalise deep emission cuts for rich countries for the second commitment period for Kyoto — this is being negotiated by the Ad-hoc Working Group on Kyoto Protocol or AWG-KP.
Another working group on long-term cooperative action, or AWG-LCA, has to come up with a long-term plan to deal with climate change with a period around 2050 as the focus year.
Both working groups circulated draft texts last Thursday for possible evolution into an agreement.
The developing countries’ grouse is that most discussions have been focused on the draft proposed by the LCA group, with little movement on the other side.
“This is not the concern of just the African countries. I think a vast majority of the countries present here share that concern and would like to see some action on the emission cut targets for the developed countries,” said UNFCCC executive secretary Yvo de Boer.
But the rich countries want it the other way round. Australia, joined by Japan and the European Union, have made it clear that they would like an agreement on long-term action before they announce their commitments for the second commitment period.
The fresh deadlock has followed indications of a thaw over the weekend when India, which had rejected the LCA draft the day it came out, announced that it was a good starting point for an agreement.
Hedegaard had a meeting on Monday with Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh and some other leaders of developing countries. Ramesh said Hedegaard gave an assurance that there would be no attempt, either from the host country or from any other quarter, to force an agreement on the participants.
“If the issues remain unresolved at the end of the conference, they will be reflected as different options in the final agreement to be resolved at a later date. But there would not be any effort to impose or force down an agreement,” Ramesh said.
