Asian giants hail Copenhagen deal: China and Indonesia

BBC News 20 Dec 09;

Asian giants China and Indonesia have hailed the Copenhagen UN climate summit outcome, despite its cool reception from aid agencies and campaigners.

Beijing's foreign minister said it was a new beginning, and Indonesia's leader said he was pleased with the result.

Earlier, US President Barack Obama defended the accord he helped broker with China and other main powers.

The non-binding pact, called the Copenhagen Accord, was not adopted by consensus at the summit in Denmark.

Instead, after two weeks of frantic negotiations, the 193-nation conference ended on Saturday with delegates merely taking note of the deal.

BBC environment correspondent Richard Black says the accord looks unlikely to contain temperature rises to within the 2C (3.6F) threshold that UN scientists say is needed to avert serious climate change.

It includes a recognition to limit temperature rises to less than 2C and promises to deliver $30bn (£18.5bn) of aid for developing nations over the next three years.

The agreement outlines a goal of providing $100bn a year by 2020 to help poor countries cope with the impacts of climate change.

It also includes a method for verifying industrialised nations' reduction of emissions. The US had insisted that China dropped its resistance to this measure.

'Make it binding'

China's Foreign Minister, Yang Jiechi, praised the summit in a statement which said: "Developing and developed countries are very different in their historical emissions responsibilities and current emissions levels, and in their basic national characteristics and development stages.

"Therefore, they should shoulder different responsibilities and obligations in fighting climate change."

"The Copenhagen conference is not a destination but a new beginning," he added.

His upbeat note was echoed by Indonesia, ranked the world's third-largest polluter after the US and China, if the effects of deforestation are taken into account.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said in a statement on his website: "Indonesia is pleased, as [we have] taken a wholehearted stance to save our Earth, to save the children in our country," reports AFP news agency.

Environmental campaigners and aid agencies have branded the deal a toothless failure.

But the head of the Nobel-winning UN panel of climate scientists said on Sunday the outcome of the summit was a start, though he urged countries to make it binding.

Hopes for Mexico

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told India's NDTV news channel: "We will have to build on it.

"We will have to make sure it moves quickly towards the status of a legally binding agreement and therefore I think the task for the global community is cut out."

Germany will host the next climate change conference in six months in Bonn, to follow up the work of the Copenhagen summit.

The final outcome is supposed to be sealed at a conference in Mexico City at the end of 2010.

US President Barack Obama defended the deal after arriving back in Washington on Saturday, describing it as "the foundation for international action in the years to come".

The Copenhagen Accord is based on a proposal tabled on Friday by a US-led group of five nations - including China, India, Brazil and South Africa.

It was lambasted by some delegations when put to a full session of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change at the summit.

A few developing countries said it was a cosy backroom deal between rich nations that violated UN democracy and would condemn the world to disastrous climate change.

Before the summit, China for the first time offered to limit its greenhouse gas output.

It pledged to reduce its carbon intensity - use of fossil fuels per unit of economic output - by up to 45%, although critics said this would not necessarily lead to any overall cut in its emissions.

China 'positive' on Copenhagen summit
Yahoo News 19 Dec 09;

BEIJING (AFP) – China on Sunday welcomed the outcome of climate change talks in Copenhagen, the day after a deal reached to fight global warming came in for heavy criticism.

"With the efforts of all parties, the summit yielded significant and positive results," foreign minister Yang Jiechi was quoted as saying in a statement on the foreign ministry website.

The Copenhagen Accord, passed Saturday after two weeks of frantic negotiations, was strongly condemned as a backdoor deal that violated UN democracy, excluded the poor and doomed the world to disastrous climate change. Related article: Copenhagen deal passed amid condemnation

The agreement was assembled at the last minute by a small group consisting of leaders of the United States, China, India, Brazil, South Africa and major European nations, after it became clear the summit was in danger of failure.

It set a commitment to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), but did not spell out the important stepping stones -- global emissions targets for 2020 or 2050 -- for getting there.

Nor did it identify a year by which emissions should peak, and pledges were made voluntary and free from tough compliance provisions.

Yang, who never specifically mentioned the accord, said the summit had successfully maintained the principle of "common but differentiated responsibility," which recognises differing economic circumstances between emerging and rich nations.

China, the world's biggest carbon polluter, has always said rich countries should take the lead in committing to substantial emission reduction targets and provide finance to developing countries battling climate change.

The Copenhagen Accord set a goal of "jointly mobilising" 100 billion dollars for developing nations by 2020.

Yang added that the summit made a step forward with regards to developed countries' mandatory emissions cuts and developing nations' voluntary mitigation actions.

"Third, it reached broad consensus on the key issues of long-term global targets, funding, technology support (to developing countries), and transparency," Yang said, according to the statement.

China has pledged to reduce carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product by 40 to 45 percent by 2020 based on 2005 levels.

China: Climate talks yielded 'positive' results
Gillian Wong, Associated Press Yahoo News 20 Dec 09;

BEIJING – China, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, lauded Sunday the outcome of a historic U.N. climate conference that ended with a nonbinding agreement that urges major polluters to make deeper emissions cuts — but does not require it.

Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said the international climate talks that brought more than 110 leaders together in Copenhagen produced "significant and positive" results.

The Obama administration on Sunday also defended the agreement as a "great step forward" — despite widespread disappointment among environmentalists that the pact does not include mandatory targets that would draw sanctions.

"Nobody says that this is the end of the road. The end of the road would have been the complete collapse of those talks. This is a great step forward," White House adviser David Axelrod told CNN's "State of the Union" show.

Disputes between rich and poor countries and between the world's biggest carbon polluters — China and the United States — dominated the two-week conference. Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets to demand action to cool an overheating planet.

The meeting ended Saturday after a 31-hour negotiating marathon, with delegates accepting a U.S.-brokered compromise. The so-called Copenhagen Accord calls for reducing emissions to keep temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees F) above preindustrial levels. It gives billions of dollars in climate aid to poor nations but does not require the world's major polluters to make deeper cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions.

"It's disappointing, that we didn't get binding reduction targets," said Danish ex-climate minister Connie Hedegaard, who led the negotiations in Copenhagen. "We've worked very hard to achieve that."

But Hedegaard said the conference was successful in the sense that developing countries are "acknowledging their responsibility for getting the world on track in the fight against climate change."

"Although we regrettably in Copenhagen did not manage to make commitments legally binding, that is a very important step forward, which will probably have far-reaching consequences in the years to come," she said.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he would work with member states to convert the commitments into a global, legally binding treaty as soon as possible in 2010.

But the international response Sunday was not all rosy.

Former Cuban president Fidel Castro said the agreement was "undemocratic" and called President Barack Obama's address to the conference as "misleading." In one of his regular essays published Sunday, Castro wrote that only industrialized nations could speak at the summit, while emerging and poor nations only had the right to listen.

Bolivian President Evo Morales urged the world to mobilize against the failure of the Copenhagen summit and said that he would organize an alternate climate conference.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, however, defended the outcome as a first step toward "a new world climate order."

The Bild am Sonntag newspaper quoted her as saying that "anyone who just badmouths Copenhagen now is engaging in the business of those who are applying the brakes rather than moving forward."

China's Yang said the outcome upheld the principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities" recognized by the Kyoto Protocol, and made a step forward in promoting binding emissions cuts for developed countries and voluntary mitigating actions by developing countries.

Under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol — that was rejected by the U.S. — 37 industrial nations were already modestly cutting back on their emissions of greenhouse gases. Under the new, nonbinding agreement, those richer nations, including the U.S., are to list their individual emissions targets, and developing countries must list what actions they will take to reduce the growth in their global warming pollution by specific amounts.

"Developing and developed countries are very different in their historical emissions responsibilities and current emissions levels, and in their basic national characteristics and development stages," Yang said in a statement. "Therefore, they should shoulder different responsibilities and obligations in fighting climate change."

"The Copenhagen conference is not a destination but a new beginning," Yang said.

China has said it will rein in its greenhouse gas output, pledging to reduce its carbon intensity — its use of fossil fuels per unit of economic output — by 40 to 45 percent. The European Union has committed to cutting emissions by 20 percent by 2020, compared with 1990 levels; Japan to 25 percent, if others take similar steps, and the U.S. provisionally to a weak 3 to 4 percent.

The Copenhagen Accord emerged principally from Obama's meeting with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and the leaders of India, Brazil and South Africa. But the agreement was protested by several nations that demanded deeper emissions cuts by the industrialized world.

Its key elements, with no legal obligation, were that richer nations will finance a $10 billion-a-year, three-year program to fund poorer nations' projects to deal with drought and other impacts of climate change, and to develop clean energy.

A goal was also set to mobilize $100 billion a year by 2020 for the same adaptation and mitigation purposes.

In a U.S. concession to China and other developing nations, text was dropped from the declaration that would have set a goal of reducing global emissions by 50 percent by 2050. Developing nations thought that would hamper efforts to raise their people from poverty.

Despite the lack of mandatory targets, Axelrod defended the agreement and credited Obama's leadership for winning the cooperation of other major economies.

"Now, China, India have set goals. We're going to be able to review what they're doing. We're going to be able to challenge them if they don't meet those goals. We're going to pursue this anyway, because the president understands that our future lies with a clean energy economy," he said.