The biggest and most important United Nation’s climate change conference in history opened today in Copenhagen, Denmark, with representatives from 192 nations warned in an opening address that this could be the best and perhaps the last chance to cut a deal to protect the world from calamitous global warming.
At the Vatican, which is sending a delegation to the summit, Pope Benedict XVI said protection of the environment requires more sober lifestyles and a rediscovery of the "moral dimension" of development. (See To save climate, pope calls for 'more sober' lifestyles.)
The conference comes at the end of two years of contentious negotiations. It began in a positive mood after a series of promises by both wealthy and developing economies to curb their greenhouse gases, but with major problems yet to be resolved.
Conference president Connie Hedegaard said the key to an agreement is finding ways and means to raise and direct both public and private financing to the economies of emerging countries for the foreseeable future to help them offset the effects of climate change.
Hedegaard -- Denmark’s former climate minister -- said if governments miss their chance at the Copenhagen summit, a better opportunity may never happen.
“This is our chance. If we miss it, it could take years before we got a new and better one. If ever,” she said in an opening speech.
Denmark’s prime minister said 110 heads of state and government will attend the final days of the two-week conference. President Barack Obama’s decision to attend the end of the conference, not the middle, was taken as a good sign that an agreement was getting closer.
In the offing is a deal that aims to wean the world away from fossil fuels and other pollutants to greener sources of energy, and to transfer hundreds of billions of dollars from wealthy to poorer countries to help them adapt to climate change.
Without such a deal, scientists say, the planet will be impacted by the consequences of ever-rising temperatures, leading to the extinction of plant and animal species, the flooding of coastal cities -- about half of humanity lives within 100 miles of a coastline -- more extreme weather events, drought and the spread of diseases.
Negotiations have been underway for two years, only recently showing signs of real breakthroughs with new commitments from the United States, China and India to control climate-change causing emissions.
The conference’s first week will focus on refining a complex text of a draft treaty. Major decisions will await the arrival next week of environment ministers and the heads of state in the final days of the conference.
The conference may not yield a new global climate treaty with every i dotted and t crossed but key officials hope it will close with deals on four political essentials.
Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in an interview with Environment & Energy Publishing, said that the four essentials calling for an international agreement in Copenhagen are:
- How much are the industrialized countries willing to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases?
- How much are major developing countries such as China and India willing to do to limit the growth of their emissions?
- How is the help needed by developing countries to engage in reducing their emissions and adapting to the impacts of climate change going to be financed?
- How will that money be managed?
"If Copenhagen can deliver on those I’d be happy,” says Yvo de Boer.
He feels an urgency to get something signed and agreed in Copenhagen, but he thinks it will be difficult to get every final, small detail of a whole new treaty done. The new climate treaty will be replacing the Kyoto Protocol which was adopted in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997 and entered into force in February 2005.
The Kyoto Protocol which sets binding targets for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions has been signed and ratified by 184 parties of the U.N. Climate Convention. One exception is the United States, and Yvo de Boer is “really happy” to see America back in the game.
A study released by the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) Sunday, Dec. 6, indicated that pledges by industrial countries and major emerging nations fall just short of the reductions of greenhouse gas emissions that scientists have called for -- and the gap is narrower than previously believed.
“For those who claim a deal in Copenhagen is impossible, they are simply wrong,” said UNEP director Achim Steiner, releasing the report compiled by British economist Lord Nicholas Stern and the Grantham Research Institute.
Environmentalists have warned that emissions commitments were dangerously short of what world climate scientists have said were needed to keep average temperatures from rising more than two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above average temperatures when the industrial age began 250 years ago.
But most of those warnings were based on pledges that were coming from industrial countries. The UNEP report included pledges from China and other countries with emerging economies, which in turn were dependent on rich-country funding to help.
The Vatican’s delegation to the climate summit is being headed by an experienced diplomat and included experts on the environment.
Archbishop Celestino Migliore, the Vatican’s permanent observer to the United Nations, was to lead the five-person Vatican delegation at the Copenhagen conference, Vatican Radio reported. Archbishop Migliore was scheduled to speak to the United Nations during the conference (See Vatican delegation joins climate change conference.)
Caritas Internationalis, the umbrella organization for more than 150 Catholic charities, also will be represented at the climate summit.
The conference will conclude on Dec. 18.
Watch the NCR Ecology channel and the NCR Today group blog for updates on the Copenhagen climate conference.
[Rich Heffern is an NCR staff writer. His email: rheffern@ncronline.org]
