Kyoto to Copenhagen: Why UN's glacial global warming talks need overhaul

Copenhagen, Denmark –Take 45,000 participants, complex global-warming issues, and negotiators from more than 190 countries. Add a last-minute dash of presidents, premiers, and prime ministers, and what do you get Evidence at the recent Copenhagen climate talks that the whole process is overdue for an overhaul, according to several specialists.Bolstered by a process that angered many and an outcome that pleased few, some analysts argue that the major issues – emissions reductions, levels of financial aid, for instance – are best resolved among a relatively small number of countries that are or will be top emitters of greenhouse gases. Oversight would fall to the Unitedations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which also would house the machinery for disbursing aid to poor countries for adaptation and green development. Others suggest negotiating narrower goals, such as a carbon tax, or devoting a fixed percentage of every nation’s gross domestic product (GDP, the total value of its goods and services) to research, develop, and demonstrate a new generation of green technologies whose costs would be competitive with fossil fuels.Whatever the path, many analysts say that once climate talks moved from affecting a relative handful of industrial countries covered by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to every country on the planet, a nonbinding accord, à la Copenhagen, was about the best one could hope for. “It is profoundly difficult,” notes Robert Stavins, director of Harvard University’s Environmental Economics Program, “within the Framework Convention on Climate Change process, to make the kind of progress that’s going to be eventually required” to achieve the Copenhagen Accord’s implied goal of holding global warming to 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F.) above preindustrial levels. Yet, he says, the accord is significant in no small part because it starts to erode the simplistic boundary the UN process has drawn between developed and developing nations.The shift in process already has begun. In Copenhagen, the final deal was crafted by heads of state, or their representatives, from the US, China, India, South Africa, Brazil, in consultation with a somewhat larger group of developed and developing countries.Dispute over China's actionsFrustration at the outcome flared soon after the talks ended Dec. 19. In a blog post at the Guardian on Dec. 22, Mark Lynas, a member of the Maldives delegation who says he sat in on many of the last-minute negotiations, describes how China weakened the final accord, to the frustration of leaders from Germany and Britain, among others. Yet some analysts say Chinese negotiators were trying to ensure that the countries most responsible for the onset of global warming path – the leading industrial countries – continue to shoulder most of the emissions-reduction burden.“Many of us were shocked” by attacks on China’s position, writes Yokling Chee, legal adviser to the Malaysia-based Third Worldetwork, in an e-mail exchange. Rich-country formulations of a global emissions-reduction goal by 2050 of 80 percent below 1990 levels would have required absolute cuts of some 20 percent from the developing world. Yet Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scientists have indicated that if countries agree on a goal of 2 degrees C, the developing world would have to substantially shift its emissions below business as usual. Because many developing countries have very low emissions, the bulk of that 20 percent reduction would fall on China, India, Brazil, South Africa, and other nations with many people still mired in poverty.What makes a country 'developing'But the boundary between developed and developing nations is growing increasingly fuzzy, Dr. Stavins says. Sixty countries classified as "developing" by the UNFCCC process enjoy higher per capita incomes than Romania, the poorest of the countries falling into the “developed” category.The