‘Copenhagen deal done,’ says US
By Fiona Harvey, Ed Crooks and Andrew Ward in Copenhagen

Published: December 18 2009

World leaders at the Copenhagen talks on climate change declared on Friday night they had reached a “meaningful agreement” that would pave the way for the world’s first truly global pact on cutting greenhouse gases.

The agreement was confirmed by US officials. But the UN and other nations at the conference had yet to announce that they had also agreed to a deal. A Brazilian official said key countries took “several important decisions” but the UN negotiating process was still ongoing. The official said: “We hope [these decsions] will bring about a result which, if not what we expected from this meeting, may still be a way of salvaging something and paving the way to another meeting next year.”

Countries had been negotiating in the Danish capital for two weeks, hoping to forge a new global settlement that would be the first to require developed and developing countries to take action on greenhouse gas emissions.

They were not able to agree a legally binding treaty, but instead emerged with a declaration on several key points, providing financial assistance from the rich world to help developing countries tackle climate change.

The aim would be to turn the declaration into a legally binding document later.

The declaration included a commitment to try to hold global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius, a level which scientists have suggested is probably the limit of safety, beyond which climate change could become catastrophic and irreversible.

It also contained a key commitment of financial assistance from developed to developing countries, to help them tackle climate change, of $30bn over three years and to a goal of “mobilising” by 2020 $100bn a year in such assistance.

Mr Obama said earlier in the day that he was seeking a declaration that was “a significant accord – one that takes us further than we have ever gone before as an international community“.

He held two meetings with Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, to try to resolve one of the final sticking points in the talks, over whether China’s emissions should be subjected to a form of international monitoring, as the US demanded.

Much remains to be resolved on the details of some aspects of the agreement, so negotiators will continue to work through the weekend in order to make further progress on issues such as preserving forests and the role of carbon markets.

They will continue their work next year in the hope of having a legally binding document that can be signed by the end of 2010 and then ratified by national parliaments before the end of 2012. That is the expiry date of the main provisions of the Kyoto protocol, the world’s only existing accord that binds countries to cut emissions, but which only applies to the rich world.

The often fractious two-week meeting was dominated in its final day by several developing countries using their moment on the world stage to attack the rich world


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