A couple weeks ago UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) secretariat Yvo de Boer held a press conference in Bonn to discuss the outcome at Copenhagen. Watch it here. It’s not too long and he has some interesting things to say about the UN in general. He also gets a little testy when people ask him about the organization of COP15…
His main points, from the notes of his talk:
1) [COP15] raised climate change to the highest level of government, which ultimately is the only level at which it can be resolved
2) The Copenhagen Accord reflects a political consensus on the long-term, global response to climate change
3) Negotiations away from the cameras brought an almost full set of decisions to implement rapid climate action near to completion.
You might note that point (3) relates to my previous post: there may be trade-offs between media transparency and efficacy of negotiations. How do we address this?
Of particular interest is that January 31 2010 (this past Sunday) was the deadline for all the countries at COP15 to indicate whether or not they want to be ‘associated’ with the Copenhagen Accord and to submit their emission reduction pledges (big surprise: not all countries met the deadline). The pledges are to be included as an appendix to the Accord, making it “a living document” in the words of Yvo de Boer. The pledges aren’t legally binding of course. It’s indicative of the Accord’s teeth that the strongest hold it can have over any country is an ‘association.’
You can check out which countries are associating with the Accord and their emissions pledges here, in a fun table with intuitive graphics. I particularly like the China graphic for ‘Type of Reduction’…
