Climate change: UN makes high-risk attempt to break deadlock on talks

Secretary general Ban Ki-moon to invite world leaders to first summit of its kind since Copenhagen in 2009
Fiona Harvey The Guardian 20 Sep 13;

The United Nations secretary general is to invite world leaders next week to an unprecedented summit on climate change, in the hope of breaking the long deadlock on global warming talks. The high-risk strategy will put heads of state and government together to talk about the issue for the first time since the Copenhagen summit in 2009 ended in scenes of farce and disarray.

Ban Ki-moon has decided he must convene the meeting because of the stalemate in the talks for the past four years, with international action dwindling even as greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise strongly, and scientific warnings over the consequences grow more strident.

He will tell world leaders next week that he expects them to attend crucial talks in 2014, ahead of a diplomatic push for a new global treaty on the climate, to culminate the following year. It is understood that he thinks one of the failures of the Copenhagen process was to bring in leaders only in the dying days of those negotiations, when diplomats had already failed to secure a deal.

By convening leaders a year before the crucial stage of the new round of global talks, he hopes to create an atmosphere in which leading nations such as the US, China and EU countries can agree the broad outlines of a new climate agreement, and then return to their officials and instruct them to hammer out the details.

The next crucial international climate meeting is scheduled for 2015 in Paris, which according to current plans is the deadline for a new global pact on emissions to be signed. Ban is understood to view climate change as one of the key defining issues of his tenure as secretary general, and is still smarting from the failure of the Copenhagen summit to produce a unified world view on the problem.

This is a gamble by the UN. The world's leading economies are currently signed up to targets to curb their greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, but at present there is no clear agreement on goals beyond that date. But scientific projections, to be revealed next week by the UN-convened body of the world's leading climate scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are expected to show that time is running out, as emissions are racing ahead of the ability of the world's natural systems to absorb their impact.

Under current emissions trends, the International Energy Agency, the World Bank and other respected bodies have warned that global warming could reach 6C, which would lead to widespread floods, droughts, famine and migration.

Ban's gamble was hailed by some diplomats as a potential game-changer. "We need to have the impetus behind this, we need to get over Copenhagen and get to a new level," said an official from one developed country.

But the history of climate talks makes clear that there is no guarantee of success. The first real international discussion of climate issues by heads of state and government came at Rio in 1992, when governments – including the US under George Bush – agreed that action to "avoid dangerous climate change" was urgent and necessary, and signed the first treaty on the subject, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. It took five years of tortuous negotiations to translate those hopes into concrete action, in the form of the Kyoto protocol of 1997.

But while the US signed that treaty, it was never ratified by Congress, so other nations did not take it seriously. Under the protocol, developing countries – even major economies such as China and India – were under no obligation to cut their emissions, and this became an increasing problem as their economies rapidly expanded. Kyoto finally came into effect in 2005, after Russia's parliament belatedly ratified it, but by then it was largely irrelevant – though the EU fulfilled its obligations under the treaty, cutting its emissions by about 8% by 2012.

The push for a new agreement to take over from the Kyoto treaty, the main provisions of which expired last year, started in 2007 with a major UN conference in Bali. Delegates there agreed after two weeks of hard bargaining to forge a successor treaty. But the scenes of anguish there - developing country representatives remonstrated with rich countries, the US refused to sign up until the last minute, and the UN's top climate official appeared to break down in tears at one point - were an inkling of what was to come. At Copenhagen in 2009, the conference hailed as the last hope for climate talks disintegrated on the final day, with scenes of chaos and farce as US president Barack Obama convened a meeting to which other leading nations, including the EU, were pointedly not invited. The UN had barely any control over events, and one delegate threatened bloodshed on the conference floor.

All this ensured that world leaders have not met again on the subject in the years since, mindful of being associated with failure. But now they are being invited to forget those torrid scenes and forge a new, historic agreement on the basis that whatever damage fractious governments can do to their own reputations during major international meetings will be as nothing to the damage that climate change is likely to inflict on us all.