Climate change accord political document: UN

The UN stand is aimed at burying  the controversy on the legal status of the Copenhagen Accord.

More than a week after the failed summit in December,  UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Danish Prime Minister Lars Rasmussen wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asking him to consider the Copenhagen accord as the first step in a global process to have a robust international climate change treaty.

Some Indian officials construed the message as a subtle UN move asking India to back efforts in either legalising the Copenhagen Accord or considering it as a basis to arrive at a legal treaty in 2010.
But since this is not what was agreed upon between the US and BASIC countries

—Brazil, South Africa, India and China—a clarification was sought from the Indian side.

Deccan Herald has learnt that the UN assurance is quite categorical in ruling out any legal status to the controversial accord. A top UN official conveyed that it is a political document to which some of the world’s top leaders had acceded to.
However, South American nations like Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba opposed the accord at the summit itself because of which it could not be adopted.

The critics view the accord as the first step to have a new global climate order junking the Kyoto Protocol in which the USA will find a place and many noble objectives of Kyoto will be given a burial. For obvious reasons, developing nations from Africa, Asia are opposed to any such initiative that seeks to blur the distinction between developed and developing nations and doing away with the principle of “historical responsibility.”

The secretary-general urged all parties to the UN framework convention on climate change to submit their emission reduction commitments to the UNFCCC by January 31 so that the world knows what’s on the table and can start negotiating accordingly in order to have a consensus document in the next climate summit in Mexico.

The open declaration of every nation’s individual commitments was one of the outcomes at Copenhagen. India agreed to cut down its carbon intensity by 25-40 per cent by 2020.  The BASIC nations will be meeting here on January 24 to chalk out the strategy for the Bonn negotiation in June.