Copenhagen Summit – Only The Beginning

Copenhagen Summit Roundup – Part 1

Published Date: Dec 22, 2009

Dubbed the largest environmental meeting in the world, the United Nations Climate Summit that took place in Copenhagen, Denmark, from December 7 thru December 18, 2009.  With almost 200 (192, to be specific) nations from around the globe gathering to discuss possible solutions to the state of our environment, the summit has been getting intense attention since its opening ceremonies, and will surely be examined as the years go by.

The main issues that the climate summit tackled were related specifically to reduce carbon emissions, believed by the vast majority of environmental scientists to be a major contributor to negative changes that we’re seeing in today’s climate, due to human-kinds activity and use (and/or abuse) of natural resources.

The challenge is finding consensus between the 192 countries related not only to the definition of the issue at hand, but the possible solutions, and (more complex) each nations’ role in the solution.  Finally, the summit had to agree on the verbiage of the agreement – this is where much of the debate occurs as all of the countries involved in the summit had to come to a mutual understanding, and stated in a way where they could all agree.

Key challenges also included core issues; carbon emissions, of course, being the main core issue.  Other core topics included the developing worlds’ use of carbon emitting resources, how might a global industrial system operate when considering a reduction of carbon emissions, and deforestation, especially in the rain forest regions of South and Central America.

Trying to agree on any one of these points would be difficult, so you can imagine how heated some of the debate might have gotten when factoring all of these highly complex topics.  Most of the critical debate came from the hardship of finding common ground between developing countries (China, for example) who have quickly growing economies, and are, as a consequence, emitting extremely high levels of carbon-based particles into the environment.  At the same time, there are so-called developed countries (the United States of America), for example, who argue that developing countries must curb their carbon emissions, while (at the same time) some developed countries (and the United States is an example of this) emit high carbon emissions per capita.  Therefore, must of the discussion resembles a finger-pointing type of scenario. 

Ultimately, the summit did result in a lengthy written agreement – critics state that the accord does not go far enough.  Basically, the agreement was to work toward reducing carbon emissions allowing each country to set their own so-called ‘green-house gas’ reduction goals for 2020.  In addition to the goal to reduce emissions, other parts of the agreement state, essentially, that an emissions verification (for accountability purposes) system will be setup, and that deforestation (the stripping of trees in fragile ecosystems like the rain forests in Central and South America) will also be reduced.

Although some may be disappointed by the, let’s be honest, highly limited reach of the summit agreement, the good news might be that the problem of global climate change was recognized as scientifically valid, and deemed an extremely important priority for public health.  In addition, another positive outcome was that all countries agreed that global warming should be limited to 2 (celcius).  Additional talks and actions will follow, and this summit was really only the beginning of a world-wide look at this global issue.

To streamline and minimize blog maintenance, I will be discontinuing maintaining the Thegreenlivingblog.com website (however, I will still hold the domain). I will gradually move all articles from this site to A Dawn Journal. This article originally published on the above website on Dec 22, 2009.