Copenhagen a disappointment, not a failure
- Source: Global Times
- [21:00 December 20 2009]
- Comments
Editor's Note:
After a marathon negotiation, the UN climate talks in Copenhagen ended on Saturday with a US-backed climate deal. The final deal is not legally-binding and there are no fixed targets for emissions reduction.
The following is an interview by Global Times (GT) reporter Wang Yuan with Shi Yinhong (Shi), director of the Center for American Studies of Renmin University of China, Wang Yizhou (Wang), dean of the School of International Studies of Peking University, and Cai Zhizhou (Cai), deputy director of China Center for National Accounting and Economic Growth of Peking University, on the final climate deal.
GT: From the stormy debates to the tentative final agreement, every single step in the Copenhagen climate conference has been very hard to take. How do you evaluate the results of the conference, and what's your opinion about the difficulties involved?
Wang: Considering there are complicated and divergent interests, it's unrealistic to expect a full, binding treaty from such a short conference. No matter whether WTO talks or the formula-tion of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, global problems have never been resolved in one go.
One mechanism for formulating international agreements is to reach a general framework of understanding, and then to make it more and more specific.
After the Copenhagen climate conference, expert groups and government departments from different countries will hold follow-up talks to discuss concrete steps.
The twists and difficulties at the conference also enlightened us that climate politics, just as with trade politics and nuclear politics, involves complicated game-playing at various levels. This is much more complex and dynamic than we have imagined.
The great powers' participation is indispensable, but smaller countries (at the Copenhagen climate conference, this particularly included island states and other environmentally fragile states) also play an integral role.
What happened at the conference tells us how international politics operates, and it's a good lesson for China on how to be a responsible power and play a greater role in international affairs.
The results of the Copenhagen climate conference are not fully satisfying, but they're not terrible. To some extent, the conference will serve as a landmark, spurring every country to direct their efforts toward the same goal.
After all, all the parties involved recognized the necessary of emissions reduction. The divisions rested on questions of how fast we should reduce emissions, and the aid that rich na-tions should provide to poor ones. The significance of the conference will be clearer as time goes by.
