An agreement dubbed the Copenhagen Accord was drawn up by a limited group of countries late on Friday December 18th. It was formally accepted by the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP15) during a closing session on Saturday morning. The climate change talks in Copenhagen were rife with disputes between rich and poor countries, and between the world’s biggest carbon polluters — China and the United States. Some might consider the Accord a failure, but it included at least one critical outcome that hadn’t been managed before the talks began.

Leaders from the United States, China, Brazil, India and South Africa sat down together Friday night and drafted the Copenhagen Accord. On Saturday, what they came up with became the outcome of the UN conference on climate change. This marked a change in the normal procedures of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which generally requires that all parties to the convention hammer out an agreement together.

Importantly, for the first time, leading developing countries — China, India and Brazil — have agreed to rein in emissions as part of an international agreement aimed at battling climate change. This is a big step for the United States and Canada. Canada’s federal government was demanding that such a commitment be made. In the United States, the fact that President Barack Obama was able to sit down and establish this arrangement may give him the necessary ammunition to push a climate change bill through the U.S. Senate — that is an essential in 2010 if businesses in North America wish to see certainty on the issue of a North American cap-and-trade system.

The Copenhagen Accord requires industrial countries to list their individual targets and developing countries to list the actions they will take to cut global warming pollution by specific amounts. Obama called that an "unprecedented breakthrough."

The accord also includes a method for verifying reductions of heat-trapping gases — a key demand for Washington, because China has resisted international efforts to monitor its progress of acting on climate change.

The Accord promises 30 billion dollars in emergency aid in the next three years and a goal of channeling 100 billion dollars a year by 2020 to developing countries with no guarantees.

A draft agreement had leaders committed to a path that would reduce global emissions to half of 1990 levels by 2050, with an 80-per-cent reduction from the developed world. That has been scuttled, but what has been created is a clear understanding that developed and developing countries are willing to create carbon reduction goals together, which may in turn lead to more legislative certainty here in North America. One victim of the Copenhagen summit may be the UN process itself. It was not possible for the 193 countries present to achieve the kind of consensus required. Will it be necessary to draft a similar statement of intent among a handful of countries prior to the next UN meeting so that we are able to make more progress next time? Maybe it’s time for a different approach.

Watch the Green Business website for more discussion of this topic in the coming weeks.

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