Outrage over Danish climate proposal

By: Rina Saeed Khan on December 10th, 2009

The UN Climate Change Conference has barely started and already sparks are flying in Copenhagen. Yesterday developing countries reacted furiously to a Danish proposal which the country’s Prime Minister had hoped would speed up the process by preparing the groundwork for an agreement to be signed by world leaders when they arrive next week.

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.”