World Leaders to Sign only a Political Agreement at Copenhagen Climate Conference

US President Barack Obama and other leaders gathered for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC) backed a two-step approach proposed by Danish Prime Minister and incoming COP15 host Lars Løkke Rasmussen.

Rasmussen suggested the outcome in Copenhagen should be a five-to-eight page document with "precise language of a comprehensive political agreement" and also that “a political binding agreement with specific commitment to mitigation and finance provides a strong basis for immediate action in the years to come”. The political agreement then will be followed by negotiations to come up with a binding legal treaty. These negotiations would continue into 2010 or possibly even beyond that.

In a final declaration, APEC countries called Sunday for "an ambitious outcome in Copenhagen" but dropped a proposal included in earlier drafts to slash their greenhouse gas emissions to half their 1990 levels by 2050, AFP reports.

The international environmental organization WWF commented that the leaders had "missed a great opportunity to move the world closer to a fair, ambitious and binding agreement" in Copenhagen, and "this does not look like a smart strategy" to battle climate change.

“Major polluters” must be included in any agreement to combat climate change and reduce emissions, Pia Ahrenkilde- Hansen, a spokeswoman for the European Commission, said. This opinion is shared by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer. For an interview with Environment & Energy Publishing (E&E), earlier this year he said that in terms of involving the USA, China and India, Copenhagen will be a whole different scenario than Kyoto. Ivo de Boer feels confident that President Barack Obama can successfully engage China and India and convince them to sign the next treaty. One of the reasons the USA rejected the Kyoto Protocol was because it did not involve action on the part of major developing countries.

Source: COP 15 Copenhagen ; Bloomberg.org