Many question what has actually come out of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC): the climate summit in Copenhagen.
Since I’ve experienced the summit very closely, from within the Netherlands government delegation, I am happy to share the mere facts of the outcome of the summit, regardless opinions.
The most noteworthy achievement is the fact that this was the first time in human history that more than 115 world leaders have made their way to a single place on earth to discuss a global climate treaty and attempt to establish one.
Secondly, it is unprecedented that the United States of America and People’s Republic of China have agreed on the same climate change accord.
But what are the actual contents of the ‘Copenhagen Accord’, the outcome of years of international climate negotiations? It’s crucial to know that the talks have followed two tracks, i.e. the CP track (Conference of Parties 15 to UNFCCC) and the CMP track (Conference of Meeting of the Parties 5 to the Kyoto Protocol, which entered into force in 2005).
Decisions under the CP track:
The Copenhagen Accord, the final agreed text by all UNFCCC member states, except Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Sudan and Venezuela, contains the following decisions.
- The Parties underline that climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time;
- The Parties recognise the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius;
- Deep cuts in emissions are required;
- Enhanced action and international cooperation on adaptation is urgently required;
- Annex 1 Parties (developed nations) commit to implement individually or jointly the quantified economy wide emissions targets for 2020, to be submitted to the UNFCCC secretariat by 31 January 2010;
- Non-Annex 1 Parties (economies in transition and least developed countries) will implement mitigation actions or mitigate voluntarily with support, respectively and submit a National Communication to the UNFCCC secretariat with measurement, reporting and verification of their performance;
- The Parties recognise the crucial role of reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and the need to establish a mechanism to support this;
- Funding shall be provided from developed countries to developing countries, approaching $30 billion for the period 2010-2012 and commit to a goal of $100 billion a year by 2020 from public and private sources;
- The Parties have decided to establish a Copenhagen Green Climate Fund to support projects in developing countries related to mitigation, adaptation, capacity building and technology transfer;
- The implementation of this Accord will be assessed by 2015.
A manifold of draft decisions have been made under CP 15, to be decided by CP 16 (next year’s summit in Mexico). Until that time, pre-CP 15 status quo (partly) remains. This applies to the following issues.
- Review of the financial mechanism, under which the Global Environment Facility;
- Updated training programme, intended to train greenhouse gas inventory review experts for technical greenhouse gas inventories of Parties;
- National Communications is a continuing process (emissions performance reporting to the UNFCCC secretariat);
- Systematic climate observations continues in the acknowledgement that observations of some large area’s of the Earth’s surface are still limited;
- Long term cooperative action: Parties are committed to enable the full, effective and sustained implementation to up to beyond 2012;
- An extensive list of programme budgets of Parties to the UNFCCC for 2010-2011 has been elaborated;
- On Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD): developing countries are requested to identify drivers of deforestation, identify activities leading to stabilisation of forest carbon stocks and to use the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as a basis for estimating anthropogenic forest related greenhouse gas emissions by sources and to establish national forest monitoring systems.
The following draft decisions have been made on the CMP 5:
- Clean Development Mechanism (CDM): a list of Designated Operational Entities (DOE) has been elaborated. The CDM Executive Board has been requested to set improvement of transparency, consistency and impartiality of its work its highest priority and to enhance its communications with project participants and stakeholders. Moreover, the Board has been requested to further develop guidelines for assessment of barriers for first of its kind projects and establish simplified modalities for demonstrating additionality for project activities up to 5 megawatts that employ renewable energy as their primary technology and for energy efficiency project activities that aim to achieve energy savings at a scale of no more than 20 gigawatt hours per year and the development of guidance to feed-in tariffs in the additionality analysis for renewable energy project activities. Furthermore, carbon capture and storage (CCS) is recognised as an important possible mitigation technology, bearing in mind several concerns;
- A programme budget for the 2010-2011 has been elaborated under CMP with Party fees – Guidance on the implementation of ‘Article 6 of the Kyoto Protocol’ states several Joint Implementation (JI) guidelines, including governance structure and resources for JI work;
- Further commitments under the Kyoto Protocol: the Parties are determined to ensure there is no gap between the first and second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol and recognise that Annex 1 Parties should continue to take the lead in combating climate change.
The full texts of this technical outline can be found here.
Source: www.dongerritsen.com
