World leaders have failed to save the Cop15 climate talks
The UN climate summit in Copenhagen has formally closed with a deal that falls far short of the action needed to tackle global warming.
Speaking late on Friday night from Copenhagen, Tom Sharman, ActionAid’s climate justice coordinator, said: "Developing countries have come here to negotiate in good faith, but feel they have been cheated and it looks like they will leave empty handed."
In the early hours of Saturday morning an agreement was finally reached between the US and some other 25 heads of state who had been meeting seperately from the rest of the summit.
The world did not get a comprehensive, legally binding international deal to tackle climate change. What we got was a weak, vague, non-legal pact that countries are not even obliged to endorse.
Emissions reductions
The "non-binding" accord "recognises" the need to keep the rise in global temperature to "no more than" 2C.
However, how this is going to be achieved is unclear, as there are no specific commitments to emissions reductions contained in the text.
There is a tentative, yet non-binding agreement to review the 2C figure in 2015 to see whether it needs to be reduced to 1.5C. The decision on this has been delayed for five years despite the fact that the small island states, the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, have stressed the urgency and the necessity of keeping warming under 1.5C.
Any commitment to 2050 targets were dropped out of the text during the final day of negotians.
Finance
$30 billion has been promised to developing countries between 2010 and 2012 to tackle the effects of climate change. This is nothing near the $200 annually that experts have said is needed. To put this money into context: the US Defence budget is $700 billion per year.
Furthermore, there are no fixed guidelines to say where this money will come from and how it is to be used.
In what seems to have been a battle between rich and poor nations, many developing countries are angry at having been left out of the final negotiations and claim that the process was undemocratic and contrary to the processes of the UN.
