COP15 Day 12

To make sense of all the information coming out of the COP15 conference in Copenhagen, Flow will be running a series of daily blog entries to keep you up-to-date on the latest news from the largest climate change event in the world. Today is the final day of the 12-day conference. 

The final day of the COP15 negotiations is certainly the one with the highest (or lowest) expectations. With more than 110 world leaders assembled at Copenhagen, and with deadlocks having already become commonplace, the pressure to produce an agreement in the hours remaining has been coupled with growing cynicism over repeated clashes between negotiators of the developed and developing world. Schedules have been re-arranged and new meetings, such unscheduled talks between American President Barack Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, will ultimately shape the final hours of the largest climate change conference in recent memory. 

Today’s proceedings didn’t open on a positive note, with the plenary session being delayed a full two-hours. But today did see Brazil making one of the first substantial financial commitments to climate change from the developing world, albeit one that came with a caveat about respecting the sovereignty of other nations in emissions reduction monitoring. This question of sovereignty has been a major sticking point between China and the US throughout negotiations, with the US insisting that China make itself more transparent. China has consistently rebuffed the demand, but along with India has recently announced that it may be more open to transparency than previously revealed. 

As of this writing, The “Copenhagen Accord,” which drops 2010 as the required year for a legally binding climate change treaty, has been the only document to emerge on the final day of negotiations. This is a different document than the earlier released “Copenhagen Agreement,” whose emphasis on the role of developing nations in climate change funding was a source of great contention. However, it is widely suspected that, despite today being the last official day of negotiations, COP15 will continue into the weekend. 

While today is technically COP15’s final day, there is a real chance that the story has at least another day left in the world’s discussion on climate change. And with the potential elimination of a concrete deadline in 2010, that discussion could continue into the foreseeable future.