Officials 'hopeful' of climate change deal
UK officials claimed to be “hopeful” that a climate deal could be reached tonight, but an agreement announced between the US and major developing economies was condemned by environmentalists as “a toothless declaration” which would not tackle global warming.
After hours of tortuous negotiations in Copenhagen, the US announced that President Barack Obama had come to a “meaningful agreement” with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao as well as with India and South Africa.
White House officials said the deal was an “important first step” although “not sufficient to combat the threat of climate change”.
It said they had agreed to “listing their national actions and commitments, a finance mechanism, to set a mitigation target of two degrees Celsius and to provide information on the implementation of their actions through national communications, with provisions for international consultations and analysis under clearly defined guidelines”.
As details emerged of the agreement which aims to limit temperature rises to 2C, a British official said: “There has been real movement this evening and we are more hopeful that a deal can be done tonight.
“Final details are still being nailed down, but we are now confident that we can get the two degree target agreed.”
But Friends of the Earth executive director Andy Atkins said: “This toothless declaration by four countries that the US is spinning as a success is exactly the opposite – as it stands it condemns millions of the world’s poorest people to hunger, suffering and loss of life as climate change accelerates.
“A 2C rise in temperature would still mean the deaths of millions of people and the complete destruction of at least four low-lying island states.
“And asking countries to list their national actions on climate change is absolutely no substitute for a legally binding international agreement.”
And Greenpeace UK executive director John Sauven said: “It seems there are too few politicians in this world capable of looking beyond the horizon of their own narrow self-interest, let alone caring much for the millions of people who are facing down the threat of climate change.
“It is now evident that beating global warming will require a radically different model of politics than the one on display here in Copenhagen.
“We don’t yet know the small print of what Copenhagen will give us, but it looks like it won’t deliver anything close to what the world needs.”
Speaking after details of the agreement began to emerge, President Obama said countries would be putting ``concrete commitments'' into an appendix of the document, setting out the actions they would take to cut their emissions.
He said it would be for each country to show the world they were doing their bit so that other nations would know who was meeting their targets.
But he admitted the emissions targets put forward by countries “will not be by themselves sufficient to get to where we need to get by 2050”.
He said more needed to be done, and described the deal as a “first step”, pointing out that many emerging economies were still in different stages of development, making emissions reductions a challenge, but had given voluntary targets for the first time.
