The international climate talks in Copenhagen last December were generally regarded as a disappointment, if not an outright failure. The frenzied final hours of negotiation had an air of farce, with heads of state pursuing one another through hallways and conference rooms. In the end, the agreement that emerged from the talks was "noted" rather than ratified under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). That designation, produced through a complex U.N. procedure known as "winging it," carries no legal force and amounts to little more than an affirmation that participating countries will voluntarily do what they had already said they would do.
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That might not sound especially encouraging. But, still, the scorn heaped on the Copenhagen Accord was premature. The brief text of the agreement released after the conference contained a notable gap at the end: the appendices, where participating countries were to list their national policies and goals. The deadline for countries to submit their commitments was Jan. 31, and though the deadline, like the rest of the process, carried no legal force, the most significant emitters met it. According to the U.S. Climate Action Network, as of Feb. 4, “91 countries, including the 27-member EU, are likely to or have engaged with the accord, representing 80.5% of global emissions."
Most of the cards are now on the table. So what's the verdict? Is there reason for hope, or was all the discontent justified?
In one sense, the news is clearly grim: Existing commitments don't add up to a solution. Though the accord recognizes "the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius," the climate consultancy Ecofys estimates that the policies pledged thus far set the world on the path to a disastrous 3 degrees of warming.
This would seem to confirm the fears of green internationalists, who have long portrayed binding emissions targets as the sine qua non of seriousness on climate change. But would putting the UNFCCC stamp on all those signatures have made a difference? The fact that the Kyoto Protocol was legally binding didn't prevent several countries from failing to meet their targets. There is no international enforcer to punish scofflaws, no blue-helmeted U.N. climate cops to dispense justice. In the end, an international treaty is only as binding as participating countries want it to be.
Are there, then, any signs of
progress? Yes. What the Copenhagen Accord pledges begin to do is put
countries on the record behind policies and programs that can be
"measured, reported, and verified" -- MRV, in the lingo. (Of course,
the details of MRV are hotly contested, especially by China, whose concerns
about sovereignty almost sank the entire deal. But, in the end, all countries
agreed to report their progress to international observers.)
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