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APEC leaders meeting in Singapore seemed to welcome a proposal by the Danish prime minister that the Copenhagen summit should only work out a comprehensive political agreement, leaving the important details for later
With less than a month to go before the much-awaited December 7-18, 2009, Copenhagen summit on climate change, leaders meeting at the Asia Pacific summit in Singapore have supported delaying a legally binding climate pact until at least mid-2010. In what looks like a compromise deal, Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, host of the Copenhagen summit, flew down to Singapore and presented a plan that he said focused on “what is possible and not… what is not possible”. Rasmussen’s two-step plan suggested that there should be a “five to eight-page agreement on reducing greenhouse gases with precise language of a comprehensive political agreement”. Negotiations for legally binding commitments on targets, finance and technology transfers would then continue into 2010 or beyond. This would give more time to the United States, the world’s second largest emitter, to pass carbon-capping legislation that would enable the President Obama administration to present a 2020 target and financing pledges at a UN climate meeting likely to be held in mid-2010. Leaders of the US, China, Japan, Russia, Mexico, Australia and Indonesia, among others, seemed to go along with the proposal. Copenhagen was supposed to produce a treaty that would replace the Kyoto Protocol that runs out in 2012. World leaders have been unable to find common ground on capping emissions and other issues such as funds for developing countries to help mitigate the effects of climate change. The environmental group World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has said in a comment that leaders have “missed a great opportunity to move the world closer to a fair, ambitious and binding agreement” in Copenhagen and that this did not look like a “smart strategy” to battle climate change. About 40 environment ministers are meeting in Copenhagen on November 16 to see how far other countries agree with the statements at the APEC meeting and identify specific details that can be discussed at Copenhagen in December. Source: The Hindustan Times, November 16, 2009
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