Discuss the different perspectives on global environment that have emerged in the context of the Copenhagen Summit. (2010, 20 Marks)
The Copenhagen Summit (COP15, December 2009) was meant to deliver the post-Kyoto treaty mandated by the Bali Road Map (2007). It produced instead the Copenhagen Accord, drafted on the final night by a small group of leaders, Barack Obama and the BASIC heads among them, and merely “taken note of” by the plenary. Its failure exposed sharply different perspectives on who should act, how, and on whose terms.
The Accord in brief
- It recognised a 2°C ceiling, promised fast-start finance approaching $30 billion for 2010–12 and a goal of $100 billion a year by 2020.
- It replaced negotiated targets with pledge and review: each state listed its own action.
- Process itself became an issue: a leaked “Danish text” and the small-group drafting convinced many developing states that the outcome was being written without them.
State and bloc perspectives
- European Union: wanted a single legally binding treaty, offering a 20% cut below 1990 levels by 2020, or 30% if others matched it; it was sidelined in the final bargain.
- United States: insisted that all major emitters commit and that their actions be verifiable, especially China’s; Senate hostility ruled out any Kyoto-type obligation.
- BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India, China): defended the Kyoto firewall and CBDR, offered voluntary intensity cuts (China 40–45%, India 20–25% by 2020 against 2005) and treated international verification as an intrusion on sovereignty. India also undertook never to exceed developed countries’ per-capita emissions.
- Small island and least developed states: demanded 1.5°C and a binding outcome; Tuvalu’s call for a new protocol briefly halted the talks. They felt let down by North and BASIC alike.
- ALBA states (Bolivia, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua): rejected the Accord as undemocratic; Bolivia answered with the Cochabamba People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (April 2010).
- Oil exporters: led by Saudi Arabia, sought compensation for lost fossil revenue.
Theoretical and ideological perspectives
- Realist: great-power bargaining displaced multilateral consensus, with the US and China guarding relative economic position.
- Liberal institutionalist: pledge and review was a realistic seed for cooperation, vindicated when Paris (2015) adopted the same architecture.
- Southern equity: climate as a question of carbon space, per-capita entitlement and historical debt, the argument Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain framed as environmental colonialism (1991).
- Climate justice: the parallel Klimaforum’s slogan, “system change, not climate change”, recast the crisis as a product of capitalist growth and ecological debt owed by the North.
- Ecological modernisation: the Northern mainstream held that markets and technology could decouple growth from emissions.
India’s internal debate
Copenhagen split Indian opinion. Navroz K. Dubash describes three narratives: growth-first stonewallers, who saw any pledge as a concession; progressive realists, who saw co-benefits in domestic action; and progressive internationalists, who wanted India to help shape the regime. Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh steered towards the middle, accepting the transparency compromise at Cancun (2010).
Significance
- The Global South fractured: vulnerable states turned on large developing emitters.
- The binding, top-down model died; the bottom-up model that followed now governs the regime.
- The $100 billion promise became the measure of Northern credibility; by OECD accounting it was first met only in 2022.
Conclusion
Copenhagen did not fail for want of science; it failed because perspectives on responsibility, sovereignty and fairness could not be reconciled in one binding text. By lowering ambition to gain participation, the Accord set the template for Paris, and every later COP has argued over the inadequacy of that compromise.