All work to save face,Earth waits

So a number of Presidents and Prime Ministers,including US President Barack Obama,whose personal reputation and tremendous goodwill is at stake,were still holding on,delaying their scheduled departures from Copenhagen,working overtime into the night on the last day of the conference to produce that one piece of paper — a political declaration that will,hopefully,reflect their commitment and efforts.

“We are ready to get this done today but there has to be movement on all sides to recognize that is better for us to act rather than talk,” Obama said,insisting on a transparent way to monitor each nation’s pledges to cut emissions.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also delayed his departure to New Delhi to pitch in with his efforts although he had already expressed his disappointment in the morning with the fact that the Copenhagen conference was unable to deliver on its objectives.

“We have all worked hard to reconcile our different points of view. The outcome may well fall short of expectations. Nevertheless,it can become a significant milestone. I therefore support calls for subsequent negotiations towards building a truly global and genuinely collaborative response to climate change being concluded during 2010,” he said,while addressing the informal meeting of Heads of States.

The leaders and their teams remained closeted for hours together in the main plenary hall of the conference centre to come up with the document that is most likely to be called the Copenhagen Accord.

Ironically though,the Accord that everyone wants to show as the face-saver would be a clear admission of failure.

It will convey that the Copenhagen conference was unable to deliver on even one of its stated objectives and,therefore,it was forced to give the mandate to continue the negotiations into the next year to stitch a deal.

But even that piece of paper,originally scheduled to be announced by 3 pm local time,was not easy to come by. The seemingly irreconciliable differences between groups of countries that prevented a comprehensive deal were also holding up the political declaration. Until seven in the evening,the draft of the Copenhagen Accord had gone through at least five revisions.

There were unconfirmed reports of negotiators and country representatives being asked to stay back,if need be,for a day to finalise the Copenhagen Accord but there was no official information on that.

Depending on what the final decision is,the negotiators might be asked to come up with a legally binding international agreement,something that Copenhagen was supposed to deliver,either by the scheduled meetings of subsidiary bodies of UNFCCC in Bonn in June next year or at the next Conference of Parties in Mexico in December.

The Copenhagen Accord will lend its support to the negotiations happening in the two working groups — the Ad-hoc working group on Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP) that has to decide on the emission reduction targets of the rich countries for a period beyond 2012,and the Ad-hoc working group on Long-term Cooperative Action that has to finalise the long-term strategy to deal with climate change,with 2050 being the focus year.

The two working groups,in the meanwhile,finished their work in the morning,submitting their respective reports that contain more than 100 brackets,meaning the issues therein were still unresolved and would be decided at a later stage.

The negotiators in the two working groups had spent another night — the third in a row for many — discussing their reports,though the host government had already started work on drafting the political agreement on Thursday night,despite repeated assurances that the political agreement would be drafted only on the basis of the reports of the two working groups.

At 11 pm on Thursday,immediately after the official dinner hosted by the Queen of Denmark,the host government invited representatives from 26 countries,that included a few heads of states who were present,for a closed door meeting to discuss the Copenhagen Accord.

India and China were asked to be a part of it at the very last minute that led to a lot of heartburn in these two countries. That meeting continued till about 8 in the morning but was unable to come up with an agreed text. Even the scheduled informal meeting where the heads of states where the heads of states made their speeches was delayed.