THE APU TIMES

The reason for organizing the conference was the soon ending of the Kyoto protocol in 2012. As well as increasing concerns of global warming and other environment problems. The city of Copenhagen was even named HOPEnhagen by some journalists to emphasize how hopeful Copenhagen Summit was. Unfortunately the whole conference was a total failure and disappointment for the majority of the delegates.

Initially the conference was divided into two conflicting groups: developed vs. developing countries. Developing states were insisting on keeping and extending the Kyoto protocol in order to leave the burden of environment protection on developed countries. On the contrary most of the western countries were insisting on creating a new single treaty which would involve all major carbon emitters, namely China and India.

Overall there was virtually no progress made during this conference. Adam Steiner the head of the UN Environment Program said “The proposals especially those from the industrialized states were all short of what the world actually needs” Indeed there were obvious economic reasons for India and China not to have any binding targets for carbon emissions in order to protect their economic growth. On 12 December there was a large demonstration in Copenhagen calling for a global agreement on climate. About 100 000 people attended it.

On the last day of conference all delegates were in total disarray despite the fact they were trying to save the summit until the last moment. One of them actually said “We’d better be frank and simply tell the world that the conference failed instead of scrambling to manufacture the text of agreement” The agreement on carbon emissions known as the “Copenhagen Accord” was drafted by the USA, China, India, South Africa and Brazil. The document recognizes the global climate problem however it does not include any legal obligations for the countries reducing CO2 emissions, neither does it include any legal treaty or numerical restrictions for the amount of emissions. Generally most vulnerable to the climate impact countries did not get the deal they wanted. Because of that industrialized countries like USA and Great Britain were pleased with the agreement, most of the developing countries as well as NGOs were against it. Greenpeace president even said “Copenhagen is the crime scene today” emphasizing the unfairness of the decision made.  Despite the fact that this agreement was named “meaningful” many delegates considered this statement as the political spin. By some reasons most of the delegates did not even see it. For instance the head of Bolivian delegation called this agreement "anti-Democratic, anti-transparent, and unacceptable".