Next 2 weeks crucial for Copenhagen accord success
[ added 19 January, 2010 ]
[ return to list ]
Rate
America's top climate change envoy, Todd Stern said that the next few weeks would be decisive in determining whether the Copenhagen accord will become an effective agreement on climate change.
The next year will be critical in fleshing out the details of a 12 paragraphs long accord, said the US state department climate change envoy, in his first public remarks after the Copenhagen climate change summit. The first important date is coming in two weeks, as the Copenhagen mandates that by 31 January rich nations need to submit economy-wide emissions targets for 2020 and developing countries to present mitigation actions.
The Obama administration would be working with other countries on the institutional structures that will achieve the goals of the accord. These include the establishment of a $100bn yearly climate fund, initiatives to protect the world's forests, and monitoring of countries' action plans.
Which forum will deliver the next climate treaty?
Stern maintained that the accord remains the best path to establishing an international treaty. But he asserted that the US would not yield full ownership of the negotiation process to the United Nations.
"Our goal is very simply to design a regime that is going to have the capability to actually help us solve the problem," he said.
Already in the run-up to the Copenhagen summit, an effort to negotiate an agreement outside the scope of the UN was undertaken by Denmark along with a group of about 30 countries. Although the latter effort ultimately backfired, it is a clear indication of the frustration with the UN process and that nations may in the future consider alternative frameworks to negotiating.
Aware of such potential advent, Achim Steiner, U.N. undersecretary general and executive director of the U.N. environment program said in an interview during a meeting of European Union energy and environment ministers this weekend in Seville that “one has to be careful to assume that another forum will deliver something that cannot be negotiated in the context of the U.N. framework convention”.
