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Copenhagen created ‘right ingredients’ for climate agreement – Yvo de Boer
20 January, 2010
UN climate chief Yvo de Boer has admitted that December’s conference in Copenhagen was not a success, but said that “cool heads” are seeing it as a way to reach an international agreement on climate change.
“It is fair to say that Copenhagen didn’t produce the full agreement the world needs to address the collective climate challenge,” he said today in his first press conference since the talks ended.
De Boer said the meeting did achieve some positive outcomes – it raised climate change to the highest level of government, it reached a political agreement on a long-term response to climate change and “negotiations away from the cameras brought an almost full set of decisions to implement a rapid climate action near to completion.”
He envisaged the political agreement reached at the talks – the Copenhagen Accord – would form a basis for future cooperation and become “a living document that tracks action that countries want to take”. Countries have until the end of January to sign up to the accord, but de Boer described it as a soft deadline and countries could join in later. Nine countries are understood to have signed up already.
“Copenhagen didn’t produce the final cake, but it left countries with the right ingredients to bake a new one in Mexico,” he said.
Mexico City will host this year’s main climate conference from 29 November, with a mid-year meeting planned for Bonn in May/June. De Boer said the secretariat was in talks with countries about scheduling interim meetings, possibly before Bonn, but more likely between the Bonn and Mexico City sessions.
He stressed that the Copenhagen Accord would not open up a third track of negotiations. Instead, he said the talks would continue with two existing tracks, on the future commitments under the Kyoto Protocol and the long-term cooperative action (LCA), which includes the US.
But he made no commitments about whether a legally binding deal would be agreed in Mexico. “Generally, people want to reach a conclusion on the Kyoto Protocol and the LCA decisions in Mexico and they will then be in a position to decide how they want to package that outcome in legal terms,” he said.
