By AFP - Agence France Presse
Failure haunts UN environmental conferences.
Negotiators struggled to reach an agreement on Saturday at the UN climate talks in Baku. If they fail, it won't be the first time.
Since the first UN climate conference in 1995, several annual sessions have descended into acrimony or even failed altogether due to a lack of consensus.
COP6 in The Hague in 2000 was the only time negotiations were suspended. They resumed half a year later at the so-called COP6-2 in Bonn, the headquarters of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
COP6 was held amid disputes over the US election, with negotiators uncertain whether the next president of the largest economy would be George W. Bush, a climate skeptic, or Al Gore, who later shared the Nobel Peace Prize for his climate activism.
“There was this uncertainty. They couldn't reach an agreement. Ministers started walking out, and they had to suspend the COP,” said Alden Meyer, a veteran observer of climate diplomacy, currently at the think tank E3G.
The immediate dispute was over the use of land-use credits, such as forests that neutralize greenhouse gases, in the emission cuts required by the historic Kyoto Protocol.
Paradoxically, the victory of Bush - who quickly withdrew the United States from Kyoto and declared it dead - spurred action in Bonn, with the European Union and other countries eager to show that climate action would move forward.
- The Ghost of Copenhagen
Perhaps no climate conference has been as eagerly awaited - and resulted in as much disappointment - as COP15 in Copenhagen in 2019.
The election of Barack Obama, who promised to turn the page on Bush's climate policies, greatly raised hopes, and the Copenhagen summit took on epic proportions as leaders from around the world gathered in the wintry Danish capital.
But the negotiators, who normally do the heavy lifting, expected the leaders to make decisions, which resulted in inertia and, later, bitterness, with smaller countries resenting not having a seat at the table.
Copenhagen became a rare modern example of world leaders personally drafting an agreement, but Obama faced strong resistance from China.
Obama needed the then fast-growing China to be part of an agreement to satisfy domestic opponents who refused to do otherwise on climate, but China rejected binding targets.
In the end, the Copenhagen agreement offered little on emissions cuts other than acknowledging the reality of climate change, although the rich countries also promised to hand over up to $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poorer nations cope with rising temperatures and disasters.
However, the blinkered delegates failed to turn this into a UN agreement due to strong opposition from a small number of countries, most notably Venezuela, whose envoy cut off his hand in what was intended to be a bloody metaphor for the developing world.
The COP - which stands for Conference of the Parties - needs “consensus” to make decisions, but what that means is a matter of interpretation.
Instead, the conference simply agreed to “observe” the Copenhagen agreement between world leaders.
Paul Watkinson, a former French negotiator, said that Copenhagen was also hampered by logistical problems that undermined momentum.
“In Copenhagen, there was nothing left to eat or drink on Saturday,” he said, referring to the day after the official end of the negotiations, although COPs rarely end on time.
The French delegation, he said, had prepared its coffee machine.
More recently, on November 2, another COP process on biodiversity ended without a decision on committing funds to halt the destruction of nature.
The COP16 on biodiversity in Cali, Colombia, lasted another night, and the Colombian presidency was unable to establish a quorum, as many delegates were asleep or had boarded return flights.
Colombia asked for the negotiations to resume in the first quarter of 2025.
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