How Paris Will Strive for Success That Eluded Copenhagen Talks
LE BOURGET, France — As President Obama and scores of world leaders convene here on Monday to kick off a two-week United Nations summit meeting aimed at forging a climate change accord, it will represent one of the largest gatherings of heads of state since the last effort to do the same thing: the ill-fated climate talks in Copenhagen in 2009.
Paris is essentially a do-over of Copenhagen, with the hope that the negotiators will get it right this time. After analyzing the collapse of the Copenhagen talks, the French diplomats who are coordinating the meetings here concluded that the prominent role of the world leaders in finalizing that deal may actually have been one reason for its failure.
That is why they decided to have the world leaders come on the first day of this year’s talks: so that they could give feel-good speeches and news conferences, add momentum and good will to the process — and then get out of the way to let the lower-profile policy negotiators work out the details.
The goal of the 2009 talks was identical to the objective of the one being held here: to forge a historic global pact that would commit almost every country, rich or poor, to enacting policies to limit their carbon emissions. And the world leaders gathered in Copenhagen in 2009 — Mr. Obama; Wen Jiabao, then prime minister of China; Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany; Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the president of Brazil at the time — did, in fact, come to such a deal. The problem was that it failed to pass the broader United Nations General Assembly and thus had no legal force.
So why did the presence of world leaders at the end of the summit meeting, rather than at the beginning, poison the process, as some contend? Here is one way to think about it: The structure of the Copenhagen talks was similar to that of a 1980s video game, like Super Mario Brothers. During the opening days of the talks, the medium-level officials arrived to draft the first phases of the deal. They huddled over technical language and identified the tougher policy points that would need to be worked out at a higher level.
Next, the top climate envoys, including Todd D. Stern of the United States, flew in to navigate that second level. Then those envoys’ bosses — in the case of the United States, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton — came in to handle the high-level political negotiations. And in the final days, the world leaders came in to close the deal. (This would be, in the video game comparison, the level at which the player would encounter a final big boss.)
But in Copenhagen in 2009, after the big bosses huddled together, hashed out the final language and flew away assuming that the deal was done, the text was brought before the General Assembly, where a handful of small countries voted against it. And in the world of the United Nations, where unanimous consent is required to pass an accord, a single no vote is enough to kill a deal.
The perception in Copenhagen was that this was a deal done behind closed doors, by a few big bosses, and that the smallest and poorest countries did not get to weigh in. And that was why, when it came time for the vote, some of those smaller countries exercised their prerogative.
This time, negotiators remain acutely aware that such an outcome is still possible, which is one reason they have changed the process. The heads of state are set to appear on the first day, but they will not do the substantive negotiating. That will be left to the lower-profile professional climate negotiators, who have deep experience with the sausage-making of climate change policy and years of experience working together. They, along with foreign ministers and environment ministers, will negotiate the language in the final days, but with no world leaders.
It will make for a less flashy conclusion, but perhaps a more successful one.