Copenhagen - the Munich of our times?

Malini Mehra, The Green Room 2 Feb 10;

The Copenhagen Climate Accord was a failure of historic proportions that is hardly worth the paper it is printed on, says Malini Mehra. In this week's Green Room, she says climate negotiations need to adopt a new approach that can overcome barriers like national self-interest.

Climate negotiations will never be the same after the Copenhagen climate summit, and the accord reached in the Danish capital may very well prove to be the Munich Agreement of modern times.

The document was an appeasement to major polluters that condemns the world to runaway climate change and declares war on our children.

The conference in December ended with an "accord", with no legal status and dubious value, as one of its key outcomes.

The political agreement was simply "noted" by governments, not adopted by them. Its very existence, however, could now undermine the architecture established by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to combat global climate change.

There is much that is wrong with the agreement.

It is not legally-binding, contains no mid-term or long-term targets for emissions reductions, and - critically - does not refer to a "peaking" year for global emissions in order to keep within the "safe" limit of 2C (3.6F) warming since pre-industrial times.

It has also failed to follow the guidance of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which indicates three benchmarks for avoiding dangerous climate change:

• Developed countries must reduce emissions by 25-40% by 2020 from 1990 levels

• Global emissions must peak and then begin to decline by 2020

• Global emissions must decline by 50% by 2050 from 1990 levels.

The Copenhagen Accord contains a reference to the 2C limit, but does not endorse it.

Given that there are no targets, no peaking years, no trajectories for emissions reductions, only vague rhetoric, this is effectively an agreement for business-as-usual.

The Potsdam Institute on Climate Research estimates that a business-as-usual accord will actually set the world on course for a 3-4C (5.4-7.2F) temperature rise.

As this is a global average, the actual warming in many parts of the world - especially in the higher latitudes - will be much larger.

Small island states have feared this for some time, hence their plea that warming must not exceed 1.5C in order to ensure "island survival".

An accord too far

The Copenhagen Accord is a cruel blow for millions around the world who had put their faith in their leaders to deliver on climate protection.

Never before had such a constellation of groups and institutions come together: civil society, faith groups, business and industry, the investment community, scientists, engineers and professional organisations.

Even the UN itself, which ran an unprecedented "seal the deal" campaign, called for urgent action.

Leaders responded to the call and came to Copenhagen, but they did not deliver.

This is a failure of historic proportions because an "encore" will be very difficult.



We now have the modern equivalent of the Munich Agreement.

In 1938, European powers sacrificed Czechoslovakia to Hitler's aggression, thinking this would appease his territorial hunger.

The consequences of this gigantic miscalculation became evident with the unfolding horrors of World War II.

Now we are making a huge miscalculation by allowing the major emitters knowingly to sacrifice the poor and vulnerable parts of the world in exchange for their "right to pollute".

They will put a positive spin on the document, saying it is just a first step; but the reality is that countries as disparate as the US, Canada, Saudi Arabia, China and India have no intention of committing to a legally-binding global climate regime, now or in the future.

Instead, we now have an anaemic "pledge and review" system, which provides little guarantee that emissions will decline as rapidly as they must.

New order

What Copenhagen made blindingly clear is that the world has changed.

We are in a new geopolitical era.

Gone are the days of outdated divisions of the world as "developed" and "developing".

Nations like China and India showed that they were the new power players and would act as nakedly in their self-interest as western powers.

It was their double act, with the US, that delivered this agreement - backed up by a pliant, if somewhat discomfited, Brazil and South Africa, and bounced it on to the rest of the world.

A key lesson from Copenhagen is that the new world order simply does fit comfortably with the archaic systems and processes of the United Nations.

The problem is not with the UN itself, but with its antiquated processes.

Bloc politics at the UN are now at least a decade out of date, and have not permitted the creative emergence of hybrid coalitions from North and South.

Copenhagen made depressingly clear that "political realism" has trumped "climate realism" and that the "G2" powers are incapable of providing global leadership.

We will have to look elsewhere for solutions.

The US and China, aided by others, have acted in their short-term political interest thinking they will be able to "manage" their way out of climate change.

But the climate system is oblivious to the vaunted ambitions of temporal nations, and a kicking is around the corner.

Those who have acted in their national short-term self-interest will find that their actions do not serve their long-term interests in a climate- and resource-constrained world.

The collateral damage of their decisions, however, will be tragic for those less able to cope.

The good news is that nothing is stopping the emergence of new players.

What we need is leadership.

Instead of dysfunctional and anachronistic groupings such as the G77/China, we need new groupings of nations that recognise the perils of climate change and increasingly see their interests as interdependent and intertwined.

Many of the nations that are putting their faith in strong de-carbonisation and green growth national plans - such as the Maldives, Costa Rica, Mexico, South Korea, Brazil, the EU and others - now need to make a common cause.

They need to cross failed "North/South" lines and devise a new politics of climate common security and collective economic prosperity.

With the next climate conference slated to take place in Mexico in November, there is everything to play for.

It may well be that Cancun can, what Copenhagen could not.

Malini Mehra is the founder and chief executive of the Centre for Social Markets, which specialises in corporate responsibility, sustainability and climate change

The Green Room is a series of opinion articles on environmental topics running weekly on the BBC News website