2 - The Danish Text...

Tuesday 8th December

We all knew that these two weeks would be filled with drama, controversy and ... but I don’t think many people were expecting it to start so soon!

On day two, an alternative negotiating text was leaked to the press – one that had been drafted behind closed doors by the hosts of the Copenhagen talks, the Danish Government. Weeks ago, the Danish Prime Minister announced that he wanted a ‘political agreement’ to be reached at Copenhagen, and since then we have all been waiting for a draft of this ‘political agreement’ to be published. And now here it is!

The Danish Government has denied that such a text exists. But I, and many others, have seen it first hand. Instead they claim that it is one of many working documents that are in existence and are used for informal consultation with government delegations.

The problem is that this text has only been drafted in consultation with a small number of rich countries. Developing countries are angry. Not only have they been excluded from the drafting process, the text attempts to shift the burden of responsibility for acting on climate change from industrialised countries to poor developing countries.

Following the publication of the leaked text, African delegates and civil society burst into an emotional, spontaneous demonstration on the floor of the conference centre to highlight the injustice of such a move by the hosts of the negotiations.

The draft text is neither fair nor ambitious. It would see the dissolution of the Kyoto Protocol – the only framework in existence for governing legally binding emissions reductions; blurs the crucial distinction between industrialised and developing countries enshrined in the Kyoto Protocol, effectively letting rich nations off the hook; contains no numbers on emissions reductions for developed countries up to 2020; and no numbers on the provision of long term financial support to developing countries to help them to respond to the effects of climate change. In short, it lacks environmental integrity and is inherently unjust.

However this is only a draft text, and there is still another week and half left to come up with a fair, ambitious and binding agreement. China, India, Brazil and South Africa have prepared an alternative text in response to the Danish draft, and there are rumours the African group are also preparing a response. The presence of these many alternative texts hopefully means the Chair of the negotiations will be given a mandate to consolidate the official UN negotiating text (which currently stands at 169 pages!) over the coming days. Any agreement must be arrived at in a fair, transparent and inclusive manner – and the Danish Government should know better!

What will tomorrow bring...?

Click here for Day 3 - the next installment

Click here for Day 1 - the previous entry