Beyond Copenhagen

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Essay

Copenhagen's Inconvenient Truth

Michael Levi

The Copenhagen conference won't solve the problem of climate change once and for all. Rather than aiming for a broad international treaty, negotiators should strengthen existing national policies and seek targeted emissions cuts in both rich nations and the developing world.

Author Interview

Q&A With Michael Levi on the Copenhagen Conference

Michael Levi

This week, Michael Levi answers reader questions about the Copenhagen conference and what comes next for international climate negotiations. 

Reading List

What to Read on Climate Change

David G. Victor

An annotated Foreign Affairs syllabus on climate change.

Before last December's Copenhagen climate conference, expectations for an agreement went from sky high to rock bottom, eventually settling at some perplexing place in between. Last fall, I wrote in Foreign Affairs that the world should narrow its expectations for the conference and focus on three basic aims: setting a long-term global goal for emissions reductions; getting agreement on assistance to the poorest countries for adaptation to climate change; and establishing the foundations of a system for subjecting countries' domestic climate efforts to international monitoring, reporting, and verification.

If one uses this standard to judge Copenhagen, then the conference was a genuine, if limited and fragile, success. But the process that produced these achievements is broken. To fix it -- and to achieve real progress at the next climate summit, in Cancún, Mexico, at the end of the year -- countries should give up on the idea of a comprehensive and binding global deal in the near term and, at the same time, begin to look beyond the scope of the sprawling UN process.

In the accord that emerged in the final hours of the Copenhagen negotiations, participating countries agreed to a target of holding the rise of global temperatures to two degrees Celsius. Although a target for actual emissions cuts would, of course, have been more useful, this consensus does provide an important base on which to build future international efforts.

Countries pledged to devote $30 billion over the next three years to helping the world’s poorest countries deal with climate change. They also set a goal of raising $100 billion annually for climate assistance by 2020; that, however, is far more aspirational, and these funds would likely be tilted toward mitigation.

And all countries agreed to report their domestic emissions targets and mitigation actions in an international schedule, with each state’s efforts subject to review. This review process is to be defined, but if it involves analytical heft and mandatory cooperation, then such a system may provide the kind of verification that countries need in order to trust the process.

But the Copenhagen accord contained no country-by-country goals for reducing emissions; these, instead, would be worked out by January 31. Although many feared that the deal would collapse in the meantime, every major country ultimately delivered concrete political commitments by the deadline. Taken collectively, as many have pointed out, these pledges are insufficient to keep global temperatures under the two-degree target. But it is equally important to recognize that they do not rule it out, either: whether temperatures are held to a safe level depends not on what countries promise but on what they do.

Still, many of these promised targets, particularly those from most major developed countries, came with worrying preconditions. In particular, Australia, the European Union, and Japan submitted pledges that are entirely or in part contingent on the achievement of a sufficiently strong global climate deal -- their exact positions before Copenhagen. This is a bit ridiculous. Copenhagen, for all its flaws, already represents a global climate deal. If it is not sufficient to trigger these countries’ commitments, what would be? By not answering this question, these states are suggesting that Copenhagen is not actually a deal of any sort. China and India, meanwhile, have submitted goals but have not formally “associated” themselves with the Copenhagen Accord, which means that the whole agreement may still collapse.

Regardless of how this is resolved, Copenhagen did make several fundamental points clear. First, progress on climate change depends on leaders. Copenhagen would have been a complete bust if national leaders such as U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao had not stepped in on the last day of talks to make compromises that their own negotiators were unwilling to consider. Second, any global summit with nearly 200 countries requiring near unanimity is inherently unwieldy. As a result, relying on the United Nations as the only forum for serious climate decisions will ensure that few actual decisions are taken.

But most countries retain a strong attachment to the UN process, whether for substantive reasons (China, which uses it to hold on to its “developing nation” status to avoid obligations) or political ones (the EU, which has made public commitments to the UN process that would be hard to reverse). In addition, the UN mechanism does have one advantage that policymakers should remember: it amplifies the voices of vulnerable developing nations, which makes it difficult for countries such as China to resist taking action in the name of defending the interests of those states. Instead of moving to fully replace the UN process, therefore, countries should instead supplement it with more streamlined forums.

Copenhagen also revealed that sharply focused issues such as deforestation are easier to manage. At the conference, countries agreed on a detailed set of rules to avoid deforestation, although they were ultimately shelved at the last minute for technical reasons.