AS US president Barack Obama turned up in Copenhagen yesterday to lobby for his home city of Chicago to host the 2016 Olympic Games, Greenpeace hung a banner from the tower of St Nicholas Church reading “Right city, wrong date”.
Environmental campaigners are urging Mr Obama and other world leaders to come to the Danish capital in December for the crucial UN climate change summit, to ensure that a deal is struck to avert the worst consequences of global warming.
After five days of talks in Bangkok this week, under the auspices of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), delegates representing 177 countries have failed to make much headway in finalising a negotiating text for Copenhagen.
“Progress towards high industrialised world emissions cuts remains disappointing during these talks. We’re not seeing real advances there,” Yvo de Boer, the UNFCCC’s executive secretary, told a press briefing in Bangkok yesterday.
“Not knowing what the United States is going to be able to bring to Copenhagen really makes it very difficult for other countries . . . to increase the level of ambition of their numbers.”
The EU has tabled an initial offer to cut its emissions by 20 per cent by 2020.
The new Japanese government has won widespread praise for its leadership in offering to make cuts of 25 per cent based on 1990 levels. But the climate change issue is making slow progress in the US Congress, weakening the hands of Mr Obama’s negotiators.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, comprising almost 3,000 scientists worldwide, has said developed countries need to cut emissions by 25 to 40 per cent by 2020 to avoid dangerous climate change.
With just over two months to the Copenhagen gathering, Mr de Boer said movement on ways to “raise, manage and deploy financing” to help developing countries combat global warming and adapt to its impacts “also remains slow”.
Developing countries want serious money on the table to help them adapt to weather-related natural disasters as well as to fund renewable energy projects that would slow down the growth of their own emissions in the coming decades.
Earlier this week, a new global study by the World Bank estimated that the cost of adaptation to climate change in developing countries would be in the region of $75 billion to $100 billion (€51.5 billion to €68.8 billion) a year from 2010 to 2050.
Negotiators in Bangkok are trying to whittle down a convoluted 180-page draft negotiating text that will form the basis of the final round of talks involving environment ministers and other senior politicians at the Copenhagen summit in December.
Referring to Mr Obama’s presence in Copenhagen to press Chicago’s case before the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Jon Burgwald of Greenpeace said “the Olympic spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play is exactly what is missing from the current climate negotiations”.
“It is not solidarity to accept that the developing world pays the price for global warming created in the developed world,” he said.
“The world needs to go for gold in December, and the big question is will Obama be a team player?”
Coincidentally, the IOC meeting is being held at the Bella conference centre, where the UN meeting in December will take place.