They got there in the end – 36 hours after the two week talks were due to have ended. A final marathon 60 hour negotiating session with barely a break saw a “result” at dawn on Sunday after the climate change talks had looked inconclusive – a result that still leaves lots of work to be done.

Beachfront in Durban, South Africa Photo: Steve Roetz

With the South African chair, foreign minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, urging delegates to thrash things out in a huddle, away went delegates from China, India, the US, Britain, France, Sweden, Gambia, Brazil and Poland to thrash out acceptable wording, according to reports in the Guardian.  

Legally binding framework agreed

Despite the “Durban platform” being somewhat vague, the very fact that countries have agreed to legally binding commitments in the future, is no mean feat. The poorer developing countries have accepted that they should adhere to legally binding restrictions, notwithstanding the fact that it is the developed world that has historically been responsible for most of the greenhouse gases that have accumulated in the atmosphere.

Jacob Zuma, president of South Africa, described the agreement as a “coup for Africa”. There is no doubting how hard the South Africans worked to resolve issues that have been outstanding for so long - it was reported that there were scenes of palpable joy in the conference centre when the final agreement was reached.

Durban Platform for Enhanced Action

All countries are now committed to signing a new legally bound climate change treaty for the first time. It is an agreement for future agreement. More specifically the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action, will see the EU and a handful of other countries extend the Kyoto Protocol into a second commitment period, with ongoing emission reduction initiatives.

All countries have now agreed in Durban to deliver a new protocol (an “agreed outcome with legal force”) by 2015 so that the necessary curbs on greenhouse gases will then be enacted by 2020.

This roadmap sets out the mechanism whereby large economies like the US, China, India and Brazil will be subjected to legally binding climate change obligations for the very first time. But these obligations will only be from 2020 onwards, and it is entirely unclear how stringent these targets will be. The cynical view is that these countries will be able to roll on full steam ahead for the few years with precious little sanction in place to compel any of the voluntary and unspecified actions which they have agreed to.

Chris Huhne, the UK’s Energy and Climate Change Secretary, hailed the deal as a ‘significant step forward’.

‘We’ve managed to bring all the major emitters into a road map leading to a global overarching legal agreement, which is exactly what we wanted,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a timeline on it. For the first time we’ve seen major economies, normally cautious, commit to take the action demanded by science.’

Green Climate Fund

The deal should pave the way for the formation of the anticipated $100bn Green Climate Fund to support climate adaptation and clean tech projects in developing world.

The Durban agreement is being hailed as a diplomatic victory. Yet it essentially concedes defeat, leaving any hard decisions to the far end of the decade when other politicians will have to deal with it. For nearly 20 years, the international community has tried to negotiate commitments to carbon cuts, with almost nothing to show for it.

So now the world had a roadmap to continue the Kyoto protocol. But it is just a framework that will need continued momentum in order to achieve concrete results. With a four year delay until a legal agreement needs to be reached, the onus is on national governments to show ambitious and measurable policies to sustain any momentum. Without this the deal will be seen as merely “kicking the climate can down the road”.

Hard decisions still to be taken

All the hard decisions are being left for the next few years when another generation of politicians will have to take responsibility. After nearly twenty years of climate change negotiations, the world now has very little to show in concrete terms for all of the speeches, conversations, conferences and huddles.

The green lobby has been very dismissive of the results, arguing that freely pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for the best part of another decade is a dereliction of duty.

“The UN climate change process is still alive” said Friends of the Earth’s Executive Director Andy Atkins “but this empty shell of a plan leaves the planet hurtling towards catastrophic climate change.If Durban is to be a historic stepping stone towards success the world must urgently agree ambitious targets to slash emissions.”

A similar message came from Keith Allott, Head of Climate Change at WWF-UK, who warned that “the outcome of Durban leaves us with the prospect of being legally bound to a world of 4C warming”.

“Governments have spent crucial days focused on a handful of specific words in the negotiating text, but have paid little heed to repeated warnings from the scientific community that much stronger, urgent action is needed to cut emissions,” he said.

“Many countries came in good faith to seal a deal, but have been stymied by a handful of entrenched governments who have consistently resisted raising the level of ambition on climate change.”

Ruth Davis, Greenpeace’s UK policy director stressed that the deal “is a lot better than no deal.”

However, she added that “we can’t keep coming back to these annual talks to agree deals that fall so far short of what the science, rather than the politics, requires. Every December the mismatch grows between what the world is committing to and what nations should be delivering.”

“Massive appetite” for an ambitious legally binding deal

The political signal delivered by Durban was she said “more powerful than the actual substance of the agreement. A new progressive alliance of over one hundred vulnerable countries, backed by the European Union, demonstrated that there’s massive appetite for an ambitious legally binding climate deal covering all the major polluters. Such a deal moved a small step closer in Durban, with agreement to negotiate towards it in 2015.”

Politically Durban was a snap-shot of the changing global climate politics, and was according to Davis “a defeat for the campaign that’s been waged against multilateralism by the U.S. and its allies for years” and a show of solidarity by the big emerging economies into taking action to cap their emissions. “But the Durban Platform still includes wording that could be exploited by the U.S. and its allies to push a voluntary rather than binding approach, and risks locking in the current inadequate level of carbon cuts for a decade” she said.

The deal, she said, “includes good elements but there are huge battles to be fought and tough choices to make if the UN process is to keep us below a four degree rise in temperatures, let alone the stated aim of two degrees.”

With the EU leading the way in demanding cuts, the US, China and India remain deeply divided on the level of cuts that they will accept. No fine wording agreed in a dramatic last minute sleep deprived huddle can hide this reality. Time will tell if the historic wording will turn out to be a catalyst for decisive urgent action to keep temperature rises to no more than 2 degrees this century, or just another set of platitudes.

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