Copenhagen Accord

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 18th of December 2009, in Copenhagen, delegates representing nations that account for over 80% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions gathered for the final plenary of the 15th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. What emerged was not a treaty, not a binding agreement, and not a mandate. It was a document that the assembled delegates agreed only to "take note of." That phrase would become the most debated pair of words in climate diplomacy.

  The Copenhagen Accord set a target of keeping global warming below 2 degrees Celsius. It promised $30 billion in fast-start climate finance and a goal of $100 billion per year flowing to developing nations by 2020. It drafted a new fund, a technology mechanism, and a reporting system. Yet critics called it a failure. Bolivia's president called the planet's situation "unfortunate." Brazil's climate ambassador called the agreement "disappointing." And the United States, one of its chief architects, acknowledged that there was "much further to go."

  What exactly was agreed in Copenhagen, who wrote it, and what does the science say about whether those pledges could actually keep the planet safe? The answers lie in the details of the Accord itself, in the clashing national interests that shaped every line, and in the work of analysts who ran the numbers after the delegates went home.

• 2. Five Countries, One Draft

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  The Copenhagen Accord was not written by the 190-plus nations sitting in the conference hall. It was drafted by five: the United States on one side, and Brazil, South Africa, India, and China acting together as the BASIC bloc on the other. That arrangement was not accidental; it reflected a deliberate geopolitical bargain between the world's largest developed emitter and a coalition of major emerging economies.

  The BASIC countries had spent months coordinating their positions before Copenhagen. Their united front gave them leverage: no deal could be struck without them. The result was an accord that drew distinctions between what developed and developing nations were required to do. Countries listed as Annex I parties, the historically industrialized bloc, were asked to commit to economy-wide emissions targets for 2020, to be submitted by the 31st of January 2010. Developing nations were asked instead to implement what the document called Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions, submitting those plans on the same date.

  US Embassy dispatches later released by WikiLeaks showed that the United States did not rely solely on diplomatic charm to build support for the Accord. According to those documents, the US used what was described as spying, threats, and promises of aid to persuade other nations to back the agreement. When the emissions pledge the United States eventually submitted was assessed against other leading nations, it ranked as the lowest among them.

• 3. What the Accord Actually Said

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  The 2 degrees Celsius threshold sits at the heart of the Accord. The document recognized, in its own language, "the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius," framing this as a condition for preventing dangerous interference with the climate system. Crucially, the Accord left room to tighten that target. A planned assessment by 2015 was to include consideration of strengthening the long-term goal, potentially to 1.5 degrees.

  On finance, the Accord made two concrete commitments. Developed countries agreed to provide $30 billion in new and additional resources between 2010 and 2012. Looking further out, a "goal" was set to mobilize $100 billion per year by 2020, drawn from a wide variety of sources, to help developing nations cut their emissions. To manage some of that money, the Accord established the Copenhagen Green Climate Fund.

  The Accord also addressed forests. It recognized the role of reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and called for a mechanism, including what the text labeled REDD-plus, to channel financial resources from developed countries toward forest protection. A Technology Mechanism was also created to accelerate the development and transfer of clean technologies, guided by a country-driven approach. China, separately, pledged to raise the share of non-fossil fuels in its primary energy consumption to around 15% by 2020 and to expand its forest coverage by 40 million hectares from 2005 levels.

• 4. Pledges and Their Arithmetic

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  In February 2010, Henry Jacoby presented an analysis at MIT of what the submitted pledges would actually deliver. His conclusion was sobering: even if every country fulfilled every commitment it had made, global emissions would peak around 2020. The resulting concentration of greenhouse gases would, in his assessment, exceed what was needed to have a roughly 50% chance of meeting the 2 degrees Celsius target.

  In March 2010, Nicholas Stern addressed the London School of Economics on the same question. Stern estimated that to have a reasonable chance of staying within 2 degrees, global emissions in 2020 would need to be around 44 gigatons. The voluntary pledges submitted under the Accord, he projected, would land nearer to 50 gigatons. Even so, Stern saw the Accord as a potential improvement on a business-as-usual path, which he estimated might have pushed emissions above 50 gigatons without any pledges at all.

  The International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook 2010 modeled two paths. In its scenario based on the Copenhagen pledges, applied cautiously given their non-binding nature, greenhouse gas concentrations would stabilize at 650 parts per million CO2-equivalent, consistent with long-run warming of 3.5 degrees Celsius. Reaching 2 degrees would require a much more demanding path: stabilizing at 450 parts per million, with vigorous action through 2020 and even stronger measures after. A study published in Environmental Research Letters was more direct: the Accord's voluntary commitments, it found, would probably result in a dangerous temperature rise of 4.2 degrees Celsius over the next century.

• 5. Voices From the Floor

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  Wen Jiabao, China's premier, attributed the weakness of the Copenhagen outcome to a structural problem in international relations. "To meet the climate change challenge," he said, "the international community must strengthen confidence, build consensus, make vigorous efforts and enhance co-operation." His delegation told reporters that the meeting had produced a positive result and that everyone should be happy.

  Other delegations were not. Bolivian president Evo Morales placed the blame on what he called a lack of political will by a small group of countries led by the United States. Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, the UN Ambassador from Sudan, said the Accord in its current form was "not sufficient to move forward on" and called for a new architecture that was just and equitable. Representatives of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, which included Venezuela, Bolivia, and Cuba, joined Sudan and Tuvalu in openly rejecting the outcome.

  Gordon Brown, speaking for the United Kingdom, said "We have made a start" but insisted the agreement needed to become legally binding quickly. He also accused a small number of nations of holding the Copenhagen talks to ransom. The G77, the bloc representing developing nations, said the Accord would only secure the economic security of a few. Tony Tujan of the IBON Foundation suggested that the failure, if treated honestly, could be useful: it might, he argued, help unravel underlying misconceptions and build toward a more holistic approach that could actually win support from developing countries.

• 6. The Legal Gap

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  The phrase "took note of" is not a diplomatic formality. In United Nations climate negotiations, adopting a document carries legal weight; noting it does not. By choosing that language, the COP delegates ensured the Accord had no formal status under the convention that had convened them. The BBC reported immediately after Copenhagen that the legal implications of the document were unclear.

  The critics who assembled their concerns after the conference identified several gaps beyond the legal status question. The Accord set no binding emissions targets. It made no decision about whether to negotiate a legally binding successor to the Kyoto Protocol, whose existing round was set to end in 2012. The deadline for assessing the Accord's implementation was set at 2015, six years away. The $100 billion per year goal came with no specification of where the money would originate or how much each country would contribute. The technology provisions lacked an international architecture. And the Accord, critics noted, appeared to overlook fundamental sectoral mitigation areas, including transportation.

  What the Accord did establish, legally speaking, was a Green Climate Fund and the commitments of specific countries, listed in a public annex, to submit their own national targets by the 31st of January 2010. UNFCCC Secretary Yvo De Boer later clarified that the January deadline was a "soft" one, and countries continued submitting pledges past it. That flexibility was either pragmatic or an early sign of how binding any of it would prove to be.