After working around the clock through contentious negotiations that extended two days beyond Friday’s scheduled closing, delegates to the UN COP 17 climate summit reached agreement Sunday morning on a roadmap for a new treaty to replace the soon-to-expire Kyoto Protocol.
The new climate treaty, to be negotiated by 2015, would not take effect until 2020 but would include all major emitters of greenhouse gases — including the U.S., China, India and Brazil — under a single agreement with as yet unspecified legal implications. The roadmap thus signals an end to the fundamental distinction in carbon reduction responsibilities between developed and developing nations – a difference that was at the heart of the 2007 Kyoto Protocol and the primary reason cited by the U.S. for never ratifying the treaty.
In the meantime, current parties to the Kyoto Protocol – including the European Union but with the notable exceptions of Canada, Japan and Russia — agreed to continue honoring their commitments for a period of 5-8 years beyond the current pact’s expiration in 2012. Under the extension, Annex 1 developed nations would continue to be legally bound to reductions, whereas developing nations would continue to be subject only to voluntary cuts.
Looking forward to negotiations between now and 2015, positions taken in the late stages of this year’s talks – particularly by India, China, and the U.S. – represent differences that are likely to remain sharp and difficult to reconcile. All three nations reject reduction targets that are legally binding but for different reasons, pitting them against the rest of the international community and one another.
In other matters, the parties settled upon a design for the Green Climate Fund, agreed to in principle last year in Cancun and through which wealthier nations would provide financial support to poorer nations for their environmental projects. Although the Fund is supposed to make up to $100 billion available by 2020, no funds were committed.
While some participants hailed the agreement as an historic, landmark achievement, others view the roadmap as yet another inadequate result of an ineffective process – a postponement that will only force more drastic cuts in carbon emissions later if worst case scenarios of a 2-4 degree increase in global temperatures are to be avoided.
