At a side event held during the talks, the UN Advisory Group on Climate Finance (AGF) presented its report to a packed audience. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the Prime Ministers of Ethiopia and Norway, and several other international experts like Lord Nicholas Stern were present at the event to hear the report’s main authors explain how $100 billion could be mobilised by 2020.

The Secretary-General said this amount was feasible and that it could be sourced from both the public and private sector. “Finance for climate change is not about charity”, he said. Rather, it was “an investment” to deliver a healthier and safer world.

The Prime Minister of Ethiopia, who co-wrote the report with his Norwegian counterpart, agreed that “even in this current difficult global environment it can be done”. Both leaders emphasised the importance of setting an adequate price for carbon (roughly $20-25/t CO2) in developing countries to raise funds and provide incentives for emissions cuts. They also agreed that many decisions about the fund had yet to be made at the negotiations.

“It is like a menu, we can choose what we want”, was how the Norwegian Prime Minister described the report. “There is no one single solution or instrument. We need a combination of public and private funding and we need traditional and new kinds of funding.”

The new kinds of funding could come from auctioning emissions allowances for international aviation and shipping, and countries could also redirect  money used to subsidise fossil fuels. This way, around $30 bn  could be raised annually. The Mexican President, who was also at the event, said the report was an “exhaustive catalogue of policy tools”. He described it as “a good tool box”.

The report was vetted by international experts and key politicians. Lord Stern is one of its expert authors, and he said the funding was not only compatible with economic growth, but that it was essential to foster a new low-carbon industrial revolution to overcome poverty and manage the climate crisis.

He reiterated the need for the private sector to play an important role and said these instruments could be scaled up with higher carbon pricing. All expressed the hope that countries would use the report’s findings to help advance the negotiations, although critics pointed out that carbon pricing was highly volatile and that there was minimal reference in the report to direct budgetary funds from developed countries.

NGOs say the “whole debate on climate finance in Cancun covers only a fraction of the total funding considered necessary for properly addressing climate change. On the mitigation side alone the International Energy Agency provides some revealing figures. It has calculated that an extra $46 trillion in energy-related investment will be necessary globally to achieve a 50% cut in emissions by 2050”. This kind of money is nowhere to be found in the discussions on climate finance.

In the documentary the Minister of Environment, Hameedullah Jan Afridi, who also spoke later about Pakistan’s vulnerability to climate change, noted that “Pakistan will not be a silent witness. We need to act now”.

The former Minister of State for Environment, Malik Amin Aslam, who has been participating in these talks for some years, said: “We are fighting two wars in Pakistan: the war against terrorism and the war against climate change”.

The science has become clearer now and climate change is a physical reality. But the world community is “caught in the complex and intricate web” of climate change negotiations and can’t move forward. In his view, “We are one of the lowest emitters of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, but we are facing the brunt of climate change given our location in the glacial melting zone and with five rivers running down our spine”.

He said climate-related disasters had cost Pakistan $4 billion in the last few years and warned that more climate refugees without hope for the future would create a breeding ground for terrorism. “We have to find a way out of this mess [of the negotiations]“.

The next speaker was Qamar Uz Zaman, former head of the Met Office in Pakistan and Vice-President of the Asian region of the World Meteorological Organisation. He explained how this summer’s torrential rains were caused when the normal monsoon system from the Bay of Bengal met a cold westerly system over the mountainous region of Pakistan, causing over 300 mm of rain to fall in just three days.

“This area does not normally receive such rainfall. The glacier melt combined with the heaviest rainfall in the history of the country, causing one fifth of the country to go under water and affecting 20 million people”, he said. The floods took around 25 days to travel from the north to the south of the country, causing destruction along their path.

“If you look back at this year, we had drought in January, high temperatures in March which affected our crops, a massive heat wave in June which broke a 50-year record and then the heavy rainfall and floods in July and August. The trend is towards extreme events, and these are indicators of how climate change is impacting Pakistan and indeed this entire region”.

Pakistan’s ambassador to Germany, Shahid Kamal, said international assistance was not adequate for Pakistan to deal with such huge floods. “If climate change is becoming a reality, we need to address the challenges”, he said.

“We need international assistance for nations facing these disasters. We hope to be able to move forward in Cancun”. There is a mechanism called “Loss and Damage” that is now included in the negotiations, and particularly vulnerable states are lobbying for it.

“This kind of flooding has not happened in this region since 1929”, says Saleem Ullah from the UNDP Pakistan office who hails from Charsadda, one of the worst affected districts in the current flooding. The UN says the disaster has left up to four million people homeless in Pakistan. Around 14 million have been affected and over 1,600 people are feared dead. This area was already reeling from the effects of the recent militancy in Swat, when thousands of people fled here from the battles between the Taliban and the Pakistan army. The internally displaced persons or IDPs had only just returned to their homes in Swat once the Taliban had been chased out, when this new disaster struck. “The people no longer appear to have the capacity to handle this disaster”, says Saleem Ullah. “Their resilience has been eroded”.

There is more bad news in the offing. The Met Office has predicted heavy rains in the coming weeks and says the monsoon system currently prevailing over the country might last until the first week of September. Rains in Gilgit-Baltistan in the mountainous north of the country have also swept away hundreds of homes and bridges. The Indus River weaves down from Gilgit-Baltistan into Khyber Pukhtunkwa province (formerly known as the North West Frontier Province) before heading south into the Punjab. The River Swat feeds into the River Kabul which in turn meets the Indus in a place called Attock on the border with the Punjab. Massive amounts of flood water have by now caused havoc in southern Punjab and have entered the southern province of Sindh. Widespread flooding is now occurring alongside the Indus as it flattens out before meeting the Arabian Sea.

Although it is impossible to say categorically that the current flooding is a result of climate change, experts are saying that we can expect to see more extreme and intense weather events in the near future.

“This was not a unique event. It can happen again given the timing and availability of moisture. What happened is that a cooler, westerly system over the north of the country interacted with hot, moisture-laden winds from the east and caused a series of cloud bursts”, explains Dr Qamrul Zaman Chaudhry, head of the Met Office in Islamabad. “Extreme weather events are on the rise and their intensity is also increasing. In the last six months alone Pakistan has been hit by a severe cyclone and now these massive floods”.

A Task Force on Climate Change was set up by the Government in 2009 to advise on the impacts of climate change in the country. The Task Force finalized its report and handed it over to the Government in February. In the section entitled “Past and expected future climate changes over Pakistan” the report says: “It is projected that climate change will increase the variability of the monsoon rains and enhance the frequency and severity of extreme events such as floods and droughts”. Recommendations called for the “sufficient expansion of large reservoir capacity… and development of capacity to deal with disasters like floods”. There was also a call to expand the “meteorological monitoring stations in various parts of the country, in particular the northern mountainous areas”.

The report was quietly filed away and to date, Pakistan has no national climate change strategy. Neighbouring countries like Bangladesh, India and Nepal have all come up with climate change action plans that are now being implemented. According to Shafqat Kakakhel, a former UNEP official who served on the Task Force, “We can see how the monsoon is becoming more chaotic, erratic and unpredictable. Last year, it came late and there was less rainfall. So either it is coming too late or too soon or there is too much rain. What the country really needs are standard operating procedures for disaster risk reduction. In Bangladesh they have FM radios advising people about flooding and people know exactly where to run to for safety. We need to have plans right down to the district level”.

President Asif Ali Zardari’s government is receiving harsh criticism for its slow response to the disaster and his decision to travel abroad to Britain as the floods began. The floods have also raised concerns for the country’s internal security. Hundreds of roads and bridges have been destroyed, countless villages and farms have been inundated, crops destroyed and livestock lost. “I foresee terrible food shortages and disease breaking out”, says Jugnu Mohsin, the editor of The Friday Times, Pakistan’s influential English language weekly. “There has been a complete state failure – the state can’t come to the rescue of the people. Aside from that, I am infuriated by the irresponsible use of resources and the neglect of the environment by the industrialized world whose actions have caused climate change. We are suffering today because of their carelessness and callousness – and it looks like they are still not willing to do anything about it (cutting carbon emissions)”.

The disaster has also been made worse by the rapid growth in Pakistan’s population and the scramble for land for housing in towns and villages. People increased their risk by building homes in dry river beds or too close to the rivers. “There has been a lot of bad planning and management” explains Ali Sheikh of LEAD-Pakistan, an NGO based in Islamabad. “Our population has just grown too fast. Adaptation is the key. We need better urban planning, we need to protect our infrastructure and we need to install early warning systems which are community-based. We also need to preserve our natural ecosystems where we can”.

Without trees and thick vegetation to slow down the water flow, the flooding took on greater intensity. “If you don’t stop the water it will go at a greater speed”, points out Shafqat Kakakhel. “Deforestation is a big problem in Pakistan”. Extensive deforestation in the country’s conifer forests started on a large scale in the 1990s when roads were built into remote mountain areas. Today, there is a clear nexus between the notorious timber mafia which operates in the north of the country and the Taliban. Wherever the Taliban grabbed power (as they did in Swat and Waziristan), protected forests were cut down and exploited with no regards to the consequences. During the massive earthquake that struck Pakistan’s north in 2005, most of the damage was done by landslides caused by deforestation. Although a ban on logging is now in place, trees continue to be cut and sold to contractors who work for the timber mafia. This mafia gets rich while the forest communities remain impoverished.

However, Saleem Ullah from the UNDP, who is also a trained forester from the Pakistan Forest Institute in Peshawar, says that heavy forest cover would not have prevented the current flooding. “Perhaps it would have reduced it by 20% or so, but there was just too much rain. One or two heavy cloudbursts are enough to cause a local flash flood – this time there were as many as a dozen cloudbursts in a row”. It was a unique phenomenon but one that can happen again given the increasing unpredictability and extreme variability of the climate. For the people of Charsadda, the nightmare continues – there are three more weeks to go before the rains subside. “I don’t know how much more they can take”, says Saleem Ullah. “They can only pray for God’s mercy”.

Editor’s note: Rina Saeed Khan, a Pakistani CCMP fellow, wrote this report on the floods in the early days of the crisis.

Outgoing UN climate chief Yvo de Boer

As the Bonn climate change talks wrapped up on 11 June, the hallways remained subdued. Negotiators and NGO activists spoke about the “re-building of trust” after the bitterness of Copenhagen and the “lowering of expectations” that had followed. No wonder then that outgoing UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer told our group of developing country journalists gathered by the CCMP that the process of setting adequate targets for greenhouse gas reductions would take much longer than anticipated, echoing his earlier estimate that “it will not happen in the next decade. But it will happen… ”

De Boer, who stepped down officially at a special plenary session held during the Bonn talks, reiterated in his farewell speech: “We know that the current pledges from industrialized countries are not sufficient to bring us into the 25-40% range [of emissions cuts] that the IPCC projects in its most ambitious scenario, but we are on a longer journey”.

Those who have worked with him in the UN secretariat told us over dinner that Yvo is in fact very upset about the way things turned out in Copenhagen. From 2006 to 2010 he had worked tirelessly to bring North and South together, aiming to “seal a deal” in Copenhagen as mandated by the Bali Action Plan. In the process, he earned the ire of both sides and became the de facto spokesman for the process (although his real job is to run the secretariat!). He famously burst into tears in Bali after spending two exhausting weeks watching countries squabble over carbon emissions.

In Copenhagen, I watched him wearily walk to the back entrance of the Bella Center, standing alone in the cold while he waited for his car, just before President Obama announced the last minute “Copenhagen Accord” to salvage some sort of agreement. De Boer thanked the doorman and drove off, only to return the next day to give a press conference in which he tried to put a positive spin on what has been subsequently described as the “collective failure of world leaders to rise to the occasion”. He referred to it in his farewell speech, saying: “To use World Cup imagery: we got a yellow card in Copenhagen and the referee’s hand will edge towards the red one if we fail to deliver in Cancun and beyond”.

By now a consummate diplomat, de Boer did not let his frustration show at the farewell speech in Bonn as he thanked the secretariat staff and the delegates who gave him a standing ovation. His successor, Christiana Figueres from Costa Rica, gave him a pair of sturdy shoes as a farewell gift, eliciting laughs as she explained how difficult it would be for her to fill his much larger ones. On 8 July  she will take the helm of the UNFCCC and will begin one of the trickiest jobs in the world – she has already described it as “thankless”.

When she later met our group she talked about “the miracle of negotiations” and the need for “gradual incremental efforts”. We found out afterwards that she had earlier told a group of journalists from the developed world that she is unlikely to see an all-encompassing deal. “I do not believe we will ever have a final agreement on climate change, certainly not in my lifetime”, Figueres had told them. She was clearly advised not to repeat those words to our group!

“What a pity she did not say this to us”, said one of the CCMP journalists. True, it would have made our reporting more honest and accurate at least, but one can understand why she was told not to repeat it – the developing world, especially the front line states who are already suffering, would like to see climate action taken as soon as possible and most certainly in their own lifetimes!

According to analyst Saleemul Huq of the International Institute for Environment and Development, “due to the global recession and the bad press received by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the general mood of the public (towards climate change) is already quite negative”. He thinks it may take until perhaps the IPCC’s fifth assessment report comes out in 2014 to recover the momentum needed to take us forward.

Farrukh Iqbal Khan, chair of the Adaptation Fund, with Yvo de Boer

Farrukh Iqbal Khan is the lead negotiator for Pakistan at the UN climate change negotiations and the current head of the Adaptation Fund set up by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Bonn. This is the first time that the UNFCCC will be able to disburse funds directly to developing countries to deal with the impacts of climate change. Farrukh is the third (and youngest) chair of the 32-member Fund’s board, established in 2008. Members come from both developing and developed countries. The board held its tenth meeting in Bonn on June 15 and 16.  CCMP’s Rina Saeed Khan spoke to him:

Rina: Has the fund given any money as yet for adaptation?

Farrukh: We are currently looking at eight adaptation projects submitted by developing countries – Senegal, Solomon Islands, Turkmenistan, Mauritius, Nicaragua, Egypt, Mauritania and Pakistan. The project from Pakistan, for example, is on reducing risk and vulnerabilities from Glacier Lake Outburst Floods in the Northern Areas by building the human and technical capacities of local communities. We have not given any money as yet as the projects are still under discussion and technical review.

Where is the money for adaptation coming from?

We received 45 m euros from Spain, and Germany gave us 10 m. Sweden has also announced another 10 m that it will give to us. We have roughly 400 m euros of our own money, the amount projected from the proceeds of the Clean Development Mechanism levy (2% on each CDM project). I have pushed for full operationalization of the Fund and we will start financing projects soon. We have accredited three agencies with the fund; two are multi-lateral entities, the World Bank and the UN Development Programme, and one is what is called by the UN a national implementing entity, the Centre de Suivi Ecologique from Senegal.

Why is it taking so long for the Fund to start operating?

It takes time to build institutions. In the next few months the board will approve the projects. It took us two years to build everything from scratch. We have evolved a direct access modality whereby countries can access the Fund’s resources directly and without having to go through the multi-lateral entities. This has never happened before and this is the innovative feature that this board has evolved.

How will this fund be different from the Green Climate Fund?

While the name is yet to be agreed, the so-called Green Climate Fund will be a major fund. An agreement on financial architecture is the key to unlocking a pathway for a climate change regime in the post-2012 scenario. We are still in the process of defining its governance structure. In addition, we have not made any determination as what would be the sources of funding. However, it is expected that this new fund will be under the authority of the UNFCCC Conference of Parties and that it should be several times bigger than the Global Environmental Facility (GEF).

Are you expecting more money to come in from fast-start financing?

I do expect more countries to contribute. We are best placed to channel resources towards adaptation, including through the fast start financing. As chairperson of the Adaptation Fund Board, I have written to all Annex I countries [required under the Kyoto Protocol to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions] to ask them to consider channelling their adaptation contribution through the Adaptation Fund. Indications are positive, and one is expecting that developed countries are seriously considering channelling financial resources through this fund.

“The noise was deafening, louder than thunder” remembers Sher Afzal, a resident of Sonoghure village located in Chitral district in Pakistan’s Hindu Kush mountain range. “It was past midnight and I ran out with my four children and saw the water rushing into the village. We barely managed to escape. We saved ourselves but lost everything else.”

Sonoghure was once considered the most beautiful village in Chitral, known as ‘paradise on earth’ in local songs and folktales for its picturesque orchards, towering poplar trees and old stone houses built on a cliff overlooking Chitral River. Now half the village lies beneath 15 ft of boulders and stones brought down in a massive flood caused by a melting glacier on the mountain above. Around 112 homes out of a total of 330 in the village were destroyed.

Mountain communities living in these remote valleys depend upon their goats, fruit trees and terraced fields for their livelihoods. They are not responsible for climate change yet they are among the first victims of rising temperatures in the region. For them climate change is not a future prediction but a present reality.

Mountain temperatures rising

The villagers of Sonoghure survived the flood which lasted for three days in July 2007 without loss of life, although they lost much of their livestock. They had been forewarned by Focus Humanitarian Assistance (FOCUS), an international emergency response and disaster risk management agency, which had been monitoring the glacier. FOCUS Pakistan also trained several volunteers in the village and surrounding areas, giving them a stockpile of provisions which helped the community to cope after the flood.

Scientists warn that temperatures in this mountain region are rising faster than in the plains. Nusrat Nasab, Deputy Executive Officer of FOCUS Pakistan says they have identified 155 vulnerable lakes in Chitral and the northern areas of Pakistan, 15 of which are particularly vulnerable. “Several-thousand-year-old glaciers are rapidly disappearing in the Hindu Kush-Himalayan region” says Pradeep Mool, a scientist working for the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development in Kathmandu. “As valley glaciers retreat, glacial lakes are forming.”

Glaciers melting worldwide

The flood that devastated the village is known as a glacial lake outburst flood or GLOF. These occur when lakes formed by the rapid retreat of glaciers increase in volume, finally bursting out of the unconsolidated moraine and ice which dams them. This leads to a sudden discharge of huge volumes of water and debris which can be catastrophic for those living downstream. Several glacial lake floods have been recorded in nearby Gilgit district as well as across the borders in China, India, Nepal and Bhutan.
 
“I believe that the glaciers in this region are melting at a staggering rate,” says Indian glaciologist Syed Iqbal Husnain of the Delhi-based Energy and Resources Institute (TERI). “Some glaciers appear to be growing, but it is the melting water underneath which is pushing them up. Sub-glacier lakes are increasing which then burst as GLOFs.” In fact, GLOFs are occurring in other mountain regions as well, in British Columbia, Central Asia, Europe and South America.

Village fears another deluge

In Sonoghure, villagers observed water seeping out of the ground near the glacier shortly before the flood hit the village – it is likely a lake formed beneath the glacier, which is still quite large. There are fears it might burst again, since there was heavy snowfall in Chitral last winter which has fed the glacier. If so, it will create more hardship. “The flood destroyed not only our fields and homes, but also the village hospital, schools, roads, water pipelines, electricity poles and swept away three bridges on the river that connected the village with the main road,” says Sahib Faraz, the FOCUS designated ‘village captain’ who was in charge of the response effort.

“We lost walnut and mulberry trees that were over 1000 years old. Each household had an orchard and we could sell one sack of walnuts for around Rs 10,000 (US$120) to the local tradesmen. Now we are taking loans and struggling to get by as daily wage labourers. We can’t even afford to send our children to college for further studies”.

Homeless two years on

It has been two years since the disaster and villagers say the government is still not helping them rebuild their infrastructure. A rickety bridge across the river connects the village to the main road and it takes well over an hour to get to the village from the nearest town of Booni by jeep. “We have lost our livelihoods. Some of us are still living in tents. Please let the outside world know what is going on here,” says Sahib Faraz.
 
The mountain villagers attribute the catastrophe to God’s will. “Perhaps we made some mistake and did not make God happy” says 73-year-old Bulbul Zar, who cannot remember such a flood in his lifetime or his father’s. Not many make the connection between rising temperatures caused by carbon emissions in the towns and melting valley glaciers in the mountains. Even if they do, they feel helpless.

Nowhere else to go

As for their future plans, they don’t have too many options. Those who have some resources are rebuilding their houses on top of the rocks where the flood hit the village, others have moved in with relatives whose homes were spared. A flood could certainly happen again, but no one knows when. They really have nowhere else to go and the realisation is sinking in that the government is not going to give them alternative land as compensation. Landholdings are very scarce in these high mountains.
 
The boulders and sand covering the village act as a stark reminder of the glacier that roared down the mountain and changed their lives forever. Throughout Chitral district, villagers look up at their glacier-clad mountains, and fear that what happened in Sonoghure could happen to them as well.

“One path would lead to prosperity for all and the other path… would lead to something very bad”,  said Kandi Mossett, a Native American activist who spoke at a side event held in Copenhagen at the start of the 2009 UN climate change conference.

Kandi belongs to the Indigenous Environmental Network and comes from North Dakota in the US, where large oil and gas companies have wrought havoc on their tribal (reservation) lands. “Where I come from, it is not a matter of if you get cancer, it is about when you get it”, she told us.

So which path did the world choose at the end of those two exhausting weeks? Copenhagen will be remembered more for what did not happen than for what actually transpired.

What was needed was a strong, binding treaty to limit greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. What we got instead were some vague pledges by world leaders to limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (how it will be done and who will do it has been deliberately left unanswered).

The US National Academy of Sciences says that if the planet warms beyond 2C the Greenland ice sheet may melt, ultimately raising global sea levels by around seven meters,  enough to flood most small island states and coastal areas.

A seminar organized by the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation on the second to last day of the conference focused on solutions to the climate crisis, while world leaders were arguing over emissions cuts in a nearby hall.

Professor John Schellnhuber, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said: “If we add up the current pledges of emissions targets we have on the table here, it would result in a warming of 3.5 C.

“Time is of the essence. If we start reducing carbon emissions in 2011, the reduction rate to be achieved would be only three per cent, which is manageable.

“In 2015, it would be five per cent. And if we wait until 2020 it would be nine per cent per year, which is unimaginable (given the structure of the world economy).

“So we must peak before 2020 – that is the most crucial point to be negotiated here”.

In May 2009 more than 60 Nobel science laureates gathered at St James’s Palace in London on the invitation of Prince Charles and signed a petition calling for global carbon emissions to peak by 2015.

So far, the European Union is offering the highest emissions cuts (in the industrialized world) at around 30%. “It would be a real shame if the EU could not deliver on that. Actually they should be offering 60%”, Professor Schellnhuber said.

“Developing countries also have to adopt low carbon emission pathways as soon as they can. We need global cuts of 40% by 2020. It is an absolute necessity.”

Carbon offsetting in the south by rich countries could not be incorporated into the peak calculations, he said.

There are a number of ways in which rich countries can cut emissions without carbon offsetting or switching to nuclear power (whose waste remains a big problem) or even converting to biofuels (which take up valuable agricultural land).

These include changes in the transport sector (introduction of hybrid or electric cars), industry (electric furnaces, switching from coal to natural gas, cement industry reduction), households (new energy-efficient homes, reduction of fossil fuels in household heating) and so on.

The argument presented by the Stockholm Environment Institute was that economic growth and emissions could be decoupled. Sweden has done it successfully.

As for developing countries, the formula presented by Tariq Banuri, a Pakistani director of the UN’s Division for Sustainable Development, is to scale up renewable energy sources like wind and solar.

Ninety per cent of the energy infrastructure in developing countries will be built between now and 2050. With technology advancing so fast there can now be low carbon solutions to many energy problems.

The market, however, cannot provide everything – subsidies are still necessary and renewables have to be encouraged by government policies.

The subsidies can be phased out when the new fuels are affordable. Banuri called for the establishment of a “global investment fund for renewables” and advocated a “green energy revolution”.

Unfortunately this innovative thinking was missing in the plenary taking place next door, where world leaders were quarreling over the remaining atmospheric space that scientists say is left (some think we have used up this space already with our carbon emissions).

The Chinese climate change envoy, Qing-tai Yu, said: “Our [developing countries'] emission space is under occupation and we want it back”. For a while it looked like the world would fail to agree to any sort of deal.

“I am reminded of my days as a trade union leader… I feel like I am meeting with business representatives”, complained Lula de Silva, Brazil’s president. He asked for rich countries to cut their emissions, saying it was the developing countries’ “turn to grow”.

The US, historically the world’s largest emitter, did not offer any new emission reductions targets other than the 4% (below 1990 levels) announced by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton before President Obama even arrived for the last day of the summit.

She also announced a US contribution to a fund of US $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poor countries cope with the impacts of climate change. Who will manage this fund is also not clear, as developing countries protested against the involvement of the World Bank.

Hopes were high that President Obama would somehow promise more and hence seal the deal, but he only reiterated what Hillary had said the day before, stating clearly that he had to ensure that “whatever we promise, we can deliver on”.

He has learnt his lesson from Al Gore, who pushed through the Kyoto Protocol only to return to the US to be defeated by the Senate.  President Obama might personally believe in the notion of “climate justice”, but his hands are tied by the Senate.

A senior American journalist told me: “Basically, the US Senate is holding the entire world hostage”. The big polluting industries are very active lobbyists in the US and have the ear of senators.

In the end, the weak Copenhagen Accord salvaged by the US and the BASIC countries (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) did not offer the world anything new and deferred most of the major decisions to Mexico, where the 2010 UN climate conference will be held.

There is in fact no deadline for transforming the accord into a binding deal, although UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said it needed to be turned into a legally-binding treaty by 2010.

In the meantime, science tells us the window of opportunity is closing – so if there is no deal this year, then we will rapidly reach the point where we will no longer have the option of choosing which path to take.

In the morning, more than five thousand people from around the world joined Friends of the Earth International’s “Flood for climate justice” and to demand  an end to offsetting carbon emissions.

Later on, the demonstrators grew in numbers as more people arrived in Copenhagen’s Parliament Square and then walked around four miles to the Bella Center, where the climate change conference is being held. The largely peaceful demonstrations, organized by over 500 civil society organizations, were marred by arrests, however.

The Danish police officers, who tower above you at heights of six feet and above,  arrested hundreds of activists indiscriminately, many observers said.

The estimated 100,000-strong crowd was part of a global day of action that brought together millions of people in over 130 countries, including candlelight vigils in places as diverse as Kabul and Jerusalem.

Outside the Bella Center a huge stage had been set up for speeches and a concert. Various groups carrying banners saying “Blah, blah, blah… Act Now!” and “There is no planet B” arrived in the cold winter evening and lit candles and small bonfires to keep warm.

Oxfam Ambassadors who had joined the marchers included Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland, former super model Helena Christensen and the Indian actor Rahul Bose.

Mary Robinson said: “This global day of action is reminding governments that climate change is hurting people. This is a human rights issue – climate change is undermining people’s livelihoods and their access to health and education. Copenhagen must deliver deep emissions reductions and at least $200bn a year in new money to help the poorest countries tackle climate change. ”

Participants were overwhelmed. Dr Saleemul Huq, a climate change expert who has served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said: “Now in Copenhagen in December 2009, I believe we have reached a tipping point.

“I truly believe that Copenhagen will be remembered in years to come, not for what happens on 18 December when world leaders meet here, but for what just happened… on 12 December…

“Yesterday marked the point when a large part of the world rose up as one to tackle a truly global challenge. Although there may be temporary setbacks (like a less-than-ambitious deal next week) the tide has already turned. It cannot be turned back”.

The divide has been caused by island state Tuvalu’s insistence that deeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are needed to limit the rise in global temperatures to less than 1.5 degrees C instead of the more widely accepted two degrees. Tuvalu and the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) say they will not be able to survive the rise in sea-level which will follow if temperatures warm by 2C or more.

India and China think their insistence is diverting attention from the present negotiations on the second phase of the Kyoto Protocol (the talks have now been suspended until G-77 sorts out its differences). Pakistan is siding with the Indian and Chinese position, although it will be hit hard by a 2C rise as well.

Its sea levels are rising already, particularly in the Indus Delta area, and the valley glaciers are melting and causing massive flooding. At the conference, however, Pakistan remains solidly behind China and India, who do not want any across-the-board caps on their emissions as that would affect their growth rates. “Our economies may be different, but our concerns are similar. We have the same stance at the negotiations”, said a member of the Pakistani delegation who is also a negotiator.

Both Pakistan and India are on the list of vulnerable countries that will suffer from climate change. In the recently published ‘Global Climate Risk Index 2010’ which reflected the most severely affected countries over almost two decades, India was ranked  at 7, while Pakistan came in at 27.

“We both have vulnerable communities and ecosystems and in the future will have to adopt low carbon strategies for our energy security”, said the Pakistani negotiator. “So really we have the same problems to address”. For now, however, their attention is focused on finding a solution to the current divide within the G-77 and on getting the negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol moving again.

Ali Sheikh, head of LEAD-Pakistan (a sustainable development NGO) and also a member of the Pakistani delegation, said: “The Tuvalu proposal is nerve-racking… For the small island states and African countries to some extent, no deal at Copenhagen is better than a bad deal. The G-77 is facing a challenge, but there are overlapping interests so let’s see what happens”.

The negotiators don’t have long to find a way out of this impasse as the ministers are due to arrive in a few days. “This issue has to be resolved soon. The ministers come to give their blessings, not to negotiate”, said Ali Sheikh.

Some sense that a conspiracy is afoot to split the G-77 and weaken its negotiating position. However, Shafqat Kakakhel, a veteran UN official who now works for the Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Pakistan and is also a member of the Pakistani delegation, says: “The G-77 will never break up – only as a unified group can we make the Annex 1 (rich) countries listen to our demands”.

Instead, though, the Danish text caused a furore as both developing countries and NGOs pointed out that it would severely undermine developing countries’ right to development by forcing them to accept carbon emission cuts. They said the proposal intended to sideline the UN Climate ChangeConvention (UNFCCC) and thus discard years of international negotiations.

WWF said: “The behind-the-scenes negotiating tactics under the Danish Presidency have been focusing on pleasing the rich and powerful countries rather than serving the majority of states who are demanding a fair and ambitious solution… talks must focus on the text that has so far been negotiated and not on new texts that are being negotiated in small groups”.

It appears that the Danes have overplayed their hand in their eagerness to force an agreement by 18 December, the deadline for the conference.

“The Danish paper is just undermining the whole process, they should not try to do this”, said one of the negotiators from Pakistan who wished to remain anonymous. “Let the process unfold itself – all the parties are willing to find agreement”.

The current Chair of the G77+China group (of which Pakistan is a member) is Ambassador Lumumba Di-Aping from Sudan. He did not mince his words in a late-evening press conference.

“The Danish proposal destroys both the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol and is aimed at producing a new treaty… the result would be to rob developing countries of a just and equitable share of the atmospheric space”, he said.

He added that the idea behind it was to “superimpose a solution on our political leaders. It does away with two years of negotiations and ministerial dialogue”.

Asked if the G77 countries would consider walking out of the conference, he replied: “All the developing countries from China to Chile who are members of G77 will be involved in the negotiation process until the last day, but… we will not sign an inequitable deal.

“We will not accept a deal that condemns 80 per cent of the world population to further suffering and injustice”.

He said the rich countries had spent trillions of dollars bailing out their banks during the recent financial crisis, but were offering poor countries only around $10 billion to deal with climate change. “Ten billion dollars will not buy developing countries’ citizens enough coffins,” he said.

Ambassador Di-Aping asked ordinary people to put pressure on their politicians to “get it into their senses” so that this opportunity was not wasted because “a few leaders want to protect their economic interests”.

There are now counter-proposals being put together by other developing countries in response to the Danish text. But none, including the Danish text, has yet been formally tabled.

The secretary of  the UN Climate Convention, Yvo De Boer, said of the Danish text:  “This was an informal paper ahead of the conference given to a number of people for the purpose of consultations. The only formal texts in the UN process are the ones tabled by the Chairs of this Copenhagen conference at the behest of the Parties.”