Earlier today President Barack Obama claimed that an agreement had been reached at COP15 in Copenhagen between some of the key countries (US, China, India, Brazil and South Africa) . While debate still rages at the conference about whether this can be called an agreement, Australian, NZ and UK experts give their first reactions below.
AUDIO:
The first 20 minutes of audio from Prime Minister Rudd’s press conference with Climate Change Minster Penny Wong, held at 1am Copenhagen time after the conclusion of negotiations at COP15 is available on our resource page here
IMAGES:
New images taken at the COP15 have been uploaded to our Flickr photo page at www.flickr.com/photos/aussmc
Feel free to use the quotes below in your stories. Any further comments will be posted here. If you would like to speak to an expert, please don’t hesitate to contact us on (08) 7120 8666 **Note new number** or by email.
Professor Hugh Possingham is Director of the Ecology Centre at the University of Queensland
“From a biodiversity perspective the biggest win will be securing agreements that deliver reduced degradation and deforestation of tropical forests. If tropical deforestation can be slowed then halted
in the name of climate change then this will be the biggest biodiversity outcome the world has ever seen. If it doesn’t, it will be the biggest missed opportunity for biodiversity conservation globally. Minor tweaking of REDD [Reducing Emissions from Deforestation in Developing countries] can deliver even better outcomes (see Venter et al. 2009)”
Professor Patricia Vickers-Rich is Director of the Monash Science Centre at Monash University
“I have not yet had time to plow through the reems of helpful output from the Copenhagen meeting – but in what I have gone through, one critical issue is not screamingly apparent.
What about the issue of population? We do not have to keep growing and keep adding more and more of us – the very agents of pollution/rapid rate of climate change that are so affecting not just us, but the whole of the planet.
Should we not spend a solid part of our time educating and offering alternatives to constant growth of population (or for that matter continued growth of many things)? Why do we have to reach that 9 billion or 12 billion mark?
Should we not be spending a significant percentage of the funds being pledged at Copenhagen to actually aim at REDUCING our population in a nurturing manner, rather than by forces that in themselves are generated by our bad behaviour towards our Mother Earth – be that by thinking we are looking after humanity in producing more of our own group so that we can dominate others, either politically, militarily, or based on our own religion.
Surely, humanity needs to nurture our own Mother Earth so there is space for a great diversity of us in the future, not in numbers but in variety. It gives me some comfort to see that a number of religious groups are moving on this issue, and that fertility rates are in some places actually falling, in particular where education levels of youth are rising and where women are being empowered to help make decisions about family size. And as families become smaller, each child in that family has such a much greater chance of getting more time with their caring parents and a better chance at an education, for the basic resources need for life are not so stretched.
We need to stop growing and look at sustaining or, better yet, reducing our numbers. That is for the good of us all, no matter what our beliefs.”
Alexander Stathakis is project manager of the Sustainable Business Unit at UQ Business School
“Drawn up last Friday by the United States, China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, the Copenhagen Accord is the somewhat sobering outcome of two weeks of intense and difficult negotiations. It is not the legally binding treaty that was aimed for and it is yet unclear how many countries will actually sign the Accord since countries do not have to endorse it.
The Copenhagen Accord is not the outcome many had hoped for. The agreement appears to be more of a letter of intent than an ambitious action plan on climate change. Especially developing countries, which are most vulnerable to the effects and consequences of climate change, are mostly dissatisfied with the outcome.
Earlier commitments to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50% by 2050 have not been included and there are no binding commitments to any emissions cuts by any country in the text. The Accord also falls short on addressing rising emissions from aviation and shipping, or limiting the future sale of emissions permits held by many eastern European nations, the so-called “hot air”.
A key issue remains whether and how significant greenhouse gas emission cuts can be achieved to maintain the 2°C threshold. Some recent scientific findings already suggest that past anthropogenic emissions might result in more than 2°C warming, even if stringent cuts would be implemented immediately. The proposed 1.5°C threshold by the Alliance of Small Island States may not even be achievable.
A second remaining key issue concern the financing of adaptation and mitigation efforts. The promised support in regards to capacity building, including financial and governance structures, seems to present a positive outcome of Copenhagen. However, African nations and small island states have claimed they would not receive enough money under the Copenhagen Climate Fund. Industrialised countries are concerned that developing nations currently may not be able to handle a substantial influx of financial support.
The Copenhagen Accord does not discount the responsibilities of any country, particularly industrialised nations and the major emerging economies, to commit to substantial emission reductions. Those countries that have drafted the Copenhagen Accord have already conceded that addressing climate change requires more than this document. Commentators have already criticised that effective climate action cannot be achieved by employing the easy solution for solving tough problems: procrastination. Tackling climate change requires determined and ambitious action – the sooner the better (and cheaper). In the following 6-12 months, it remains to be seen if the Accord can be turned into legally binding action, the Copenhagen Climate Fund be launched, and if mitigation efforts are increased.
There appears to be a general consensus among the majority of UNFCCC members that an increase in global temperature of no more than 2°C warming, and therefore dangerous climate change, is to be avoided. For future meetings the question remains whether scientific recommendations to drastically cut emissions can be transformed into meaningful action.”
Dr Helen McGregor is an AINSE Research Fellow in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at University of Wollongong
“While the COP15 “agreement” is better than nothing it does not go far enough. The science is clear that the climate is warming – and with further delays in reducing emissions the warming will continue, and the negative impacts for society more likely. I am disappointed that a legally binding agreement hasn’t been reached. The sooner emissions are reduced the better, and let’s hope that for the sake of our future a more concrete agreement is reached soon.”
Ian Lowe is Emeritus professor of science, technology and society at Griffith University,Qld and President of the Australian Conservation Foundation.
“It is not yet clear if the proposed agreement will be accepted. But the Copenhagen conference was a significant step forward. Over 100 world leaders agreed that urgent concerted action is needed to slow climate change.
For the first time, all the major greenhouse gas emitters have agreed to be part of a global accord to tackle the problem. But it still needs to be turned into a treaty with legal force. More importantly, the developed nations – including Australia – have to put forward serious plans for the scale of emissions cuts needed, toward 40 per cent by 2020. As US President Obama said last night, the targets being put forward today are not sufficient and the science demands more aggressive action.
Kevin Rudd has to stand up to the big polluters and govern for Australia as a whole by setting serious emission reduction standards. The conditions set by the government for going to a 25 per cent target have largely been met. The science says we should go further. There is no economic or social reason to delay.”
Dr John Church is Principle Research Scientist in CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research and Leader of the Sea Level Rise Program at the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystem Cooperative Research Centre.
“The Copenhagen Accord commitment to no more than a 2 degrees Celsius warming reduces the risk of ‘dangerous’ climate change and is a welcome development. Limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius requires urgent and significant greenhouse gas emission reductions of significantly more than the current Australian targets of 5-15% by 2020 and 60% by 2050. Failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions commits the World to metres of sea-level rise, with severe consequences for many millions of people and the natural environment.”
The following comments by Tim Flannery were made at 11pm in Copenhagen, before an agreement had been announced.
Professor Tim Flannery is Chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council and Macquarie University’s Division of Environmental and Life Sciences
“We’ve made a huge advance at this meeting on a number of fronts, one being those pledged emissions, another being the funding we’ve now got for adaptation and mitigation in developing countries. The third is the REDD negotiations, the world’s efforts to protect the tropical rainforests and that seems to be going very well indeed.
“In the absence of any shift in the American target, we are likely to be a few gigatonnes of carbon short of a satisfactory target for 2020. It doesn’t mean we won’t achieve it, but the agreement as it looks at the moment, is good but not perfect.
“We will probably be looking at humanity overall emitting 48 – 50 gigatonnes of carbon in 2020 and we need to be a bit lower than that, around 44 or 45. To get to that lower level you really need a more aggressive reduction target from the US by a couple of percentage points. You’d need China to tighten up its efficiency gains by another five per cent. Hopefully that would be enough to trigger the Europeans coming in with their 30 per cent reduction target. That would put us in a better position in terms of the science.”
Listen to the full audio from the online briefing with Tim Flannery held at 9am AEDT on 19th December.
From the NZ Science Media Centre:
Dr Jim Salinger, climate scientist and honorary researcher University of Auckland comments (from the Cook Islands):
“As I sit in the tropical Pacific I welcome the news that the big players: USA, China, India, Brazil and South Africa have committed to limit temperature increases to 2 degrees C. It is essential that all countries sign on to effective emissions reductions targets of greenhouse gases by 40% at 2020 and 80% by 2080 to prevent disruptive climate change and sea level rise later this century that so threaten peoples such as those in the tropical Pacific.”
Professor Martin Manning, Director of the New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute at Victoria University of Wellington comments (from San Francisco):
“This week’s American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco has involved thousands of top climate change scientists from around the world and covered much of the current research underlying the issues considered in Copenhagen. The feasibility of keeping global average warming to 2C was not intended to be an issue for this conference, but it has come up in several ways and there is a general feeling that it seems to be beyond what we know how to achieve.
“Coverage of the Copenhagen conference in the US media today has also implied that the 2C target is seen here as being an optimistic goal rather than an international obligation. However, a possible positive perspective has arisen on the research side in San Francisco and this is the potential for new techniques that can actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere at costs that would be reasonable given the seriousness of larger warming.”
Professor Ralph Sims, School of Engineering and Advanced Technology, Massey University:
“Regardless of the non-outcome (though final negotiations are currently still underway, as many of us predicted, getting traction for post-Kyoto targets proved too difficult with US leadership constrained by lack of support through the Senate), New Zealand could still make progress given political will.
(Note, I am closely involved with IPCC and IEA, including writing the renewable energy and agricultural sections in the IPCC 3rd Assessment Report, leading the Energy Supply chapter in the IPCC 4th Assessment Report, am currently leading the Integration chapter in the IPCC Special Report on Renewables, and was based at the IEA for nearly 4 years, working on, inter alia, the 450ppm Policy Scenario. So these comments based on that background).
1) The key message from IPCC and IEA for several years is that “we are running out of time”. There is additional empirical evidence for this building up that supports the findings of the various climate models. So at the same time as more R&D is undertaken, NZ also needs to continue to strive to reduce its present emissions.
2) The success in Copenhagen for NZ of the agricultural research consortium is one of the few positive outcomes from COP 15, but let’s put it in perspective.
We have long known agriculture accounts for around 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions (IPCC, 3rd AR, 2001) -(though it seems to be a new revelation for Tim Groser)!
We also have known for a long time that NZ has around half its emissions arising from that source – which is unusual in OECD countries. We have invested a little public R&D in this area in recent years with input from the farming industry, so the $45M now put on the table is an improvement on that – but it is 10 years too late! We should not forget that this research could take 20 or 30 years (or longer) before it has any practical impact on methane and nitrous oxide emissions, or, in a worse-case scenario, as with any research, there is no guarantee of success at all.
3) The pattern of public R&D investment shows most OECD countries, (the graph is for IEA member countries including NZ), have not exactly taken energy research seriously since the oil shocks of the 1970s (when in NZ the Liquid Fuels Trust Board and the NZ Energy Research Committee were established to fund major projects). The same applies to greenhouse gas reduction research. Yet we have known about the huge problem for years. To make a difference we need to provide much more RD&D funding than at present. NZers spend around $9bn /yr on energy and wastes much of it. Yet our RDD&D investment is just a very small percentage of this.
4) R&D for carbon dioxide capture and storage, ruminant methane emissions, nitrous oxides from fertilisers etc takes time. Yet many mitigation technologies- energy efficient devices, renewable energy systems etc we have known about for years. They are mature, proven and now simply need wider deployment – in parallel with continuing R&D investments.
5) Deployment of energy efficient and renewable energy technologies to provide heat, transport fuels as well as electricity, provide the co-benefits of energy security, industry developments, employment opportunities, sustainable development, export opportunity and usually savings in costs – as well as reduced greenhouse gas emissions.
6) Renewable energy knows no boundaries. The future hope is that local governments will take a greater lead than national governments. Various organizations (ICLEI for example) had a high profile in Copenhagen but this was not widely reported. (My latest IEA book, launched just before Copenhagen where it was displayed on the IEA stand, “Cities, Towns and Renewable Energy – YIMFY – Yes In My Front Yard!”, exemplifies how this can be achieved in moving towards the new paradigm of distributed energy systems).
7) So in summary, the NZ Copenhagen success for agricultural research support was positive.
But the government could do so much more in the immediate future by encouraging the rapid deployment of mature technologies, and not rest solely on the unknown potential for long-shot technologies still in the research laboratories.
Contributing only 0.03% of greenhouse gases is an irrelevant statistic. On a per capita basis, which is how sharing the planet’s resources should be measured, New Zealand remains one of the highest.
Mr Groser suggested that in the next decade or two he would like developing countries to “bend their annual emissions curve by 15 to 30% down” from the business-as-usual straight line going up. He would be wise to check out New Zealand’s own emission curve first before making such statements. Since 1990 and even after signing the Kyoto Protocol, it is a straight line going up steeply. It is clear why developing countries reacted negatively to such comments in Copenhagen and caused the deadlocks.
How can we expect those in developing countries to reduce their emissions when we cannot get our own curves to bend downwards, knowing that the technologies are already available to make it happen? NZ could lead by example – but it is not.”
Dr Andy Reisinger, Senior Research Fellow – New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute, Victoria University of Wellington.
“The deal reached in Copenhagen is a crucial breakthrough because it provides for verifiable emissions reductions targets by most of the world’s largest emitters. As such, it is an very important political statement with global implications.
“The devil is in the details though. It is worrying that even those countries that brokered the deal have admitted that the specific emissions targets will not be stringent enough to reach their stated long-term goal, which is to limit global average temperature increases to no more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels. We will have to wait until the final numbers are on table to see how far the actual emissions targets fall short of that ultimate goal, and what amount of warming we might expect more realistically once the dust and celebratory rhetoric has settled.
“It is unclear at this stage what this deal means for New Zealand, because most of the rules by which emissions targets will be set and measured are not clear. The agreement does send clear messages from the world’s largest economies that they take climate change seriously, and that they expect emissions reductions to be subject to international consultation and analysis.
“The deal includes a long-term target for industrialised countries to reduce their emissions, individually or jointly, by at least 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. If New Zealand wants to be part of this club, it will have to either reconsider its own long-term target, which provides for emissions reductions of only 50% by 2050, or come up with sound and credible reasons that are acceptable to the international community why it should be treated differently, even many decades into the future.”
Professor Suzi Kerr, Visiting Professor, Stanford University, Department of Economics, Senior Fellow, Motu Economic and Public Policy Research
“The agreement on a transparent monitoring mechanism is a relief and a major step forward with respect to some key developing countries. Elinor Ostrom (Winner of the 2009 Nobel prize in economics) has found that to build trust and cooperation without external enforcement, a key prerequisite is that they have credible information about each others’ actions so they can reward and penalize each other. Transparent monitoring is by no means sufficient to successfully address climate change on a global scale but is a critical necessary step.
“The fact that the agreement is not legally binding may not be that critical given that international agreements are essentially unenforceable in any case. It may however weaken the pressure to comply.
“We will need to see the details of the final agreement to understand how this will affect countries’ abilities to make part of their contribution to the climate effort through paying other countries to go beyond their agreed targets. We may need a separate legally binding agreement between countries that will be linked in a common emissions trading system. Trading is critical because it allows us to contribute beyond the opportunities for emissions reductions within New Zealand. As a rich country we should be prepared to be generous in our contribution to the global effort.
“However we don’t want to waste our resources with unnecessarily high cost domestic actions. We won’t be able to achieve the awesome task before us unless we can do it in the smartest most efficient ways possible and that requires that we pay for actions in developing countries. Emissions trading (cap and trade) is the best currently available instrument for achieving the enormous transfers required. The Clean Development Mechanism is not effective because ‘reductions’ are measured relative to an unobservable counterfactual and a large percentage of the apparent reductions are not real. This problem can be avoided if we are trading with countries with verifiable national targets.
“It is too soon to judge the success of the agreement but we need to remember that climate change is the ultimate free rider problem, it is costly and it involves profound distributional issues. Any agreement that involves meaningful verifiable reduction targets from most of the major emitters, builds on the flexibility of the previous agreement and creates a stronger framework for moving forward will be a major achievement. We should not only look at the achievements as a glass half full but remember that without the enormous effort of many people, including many New Zealanders, that glass would still be close to empty.”
From the UK Science Media Centre:
Professor Mark Maslin, Director Of The Environment Institute at University College London, said:
“The science tells us that we must drastically cut the amount of carbon going into the atmosphere to avoid catastrophic climate change. But we must also protect the moral and ethical right of countries to develop and achieve the same standard of living as we have in the west.
“Any deal agreed at Copenhagen must achieve these twin goals. If what is agreed is too weak then Copenhagen should be seen as a stepping stone to stronger commitments and a fully legally binding treaty at COP16 next year. As global carbon reductions will be the issue of the twenty-first century and thus Copenhagen is not the end but just a beginning of the mammoth task facing humanity. There is no reason why by the end of this century we cannot achieve a low-carbon world in which global poverty has been eradicated; it just takes the public to support brave and enlightened politicians in their drive for a better world.”
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