Danish draft reappears

Fresh drafts came out of both the working groups,the one on Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP) and the other finalising the long-term action to deal with climate change (AWG-LCA),and these were supposed to be presented to the high-level segment which had started Tuesday evening.

The new draft text on the LCA track has interesting additional options,including a global goal to limit the temperature rise to one degree centigrade and another to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from the rich countries by 100 per cent by the year 2040. Both these options are new formulations and never figured prominently in earlier discussions. However,the entire text of the new draft has been put under a bracket,meaning the entire thing was up for negotiation.

By the evening,the draft had gone through two more revisions but those were not immediately made public.

But it was the announcement by conference president Connie Hedegaard,Denmark’s Energy and Climate Minister,regarding a new Danish text that was the point of discussion through most of the day.

Hedegaard,making her final comments as the conference president,said the presidency — meaning the host country — had decided to present a draft text from its own side.

Hedegaard stepped down from the post of conference president immediately after that to let her Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen to take charge of the proceedings which now involve the heads of states.

It was not clear whether the draft text Hedegaard referred to was the same that had been circulated by the host country to a few select countries last week,causing a major uproar,or an amended version of that. No one in the Indian negotiating team had seen the latest Danish draft text but one senior negotiator said his understanding was that it was a ‘slightly amended’ version of the previous one and was prepared in consultations with the US and Australia.

The announcement,nevertheless,sparked off protests from the BASIC and other developing countries,which accused the presidency of adopting a non-transparent approach to the negotiations. They complained that the host country was trying to undermine the efforts of the negotiators who had worked through the night to achieve some progress on moving toward an agreed outcome and demanded an assurance from Rasmussen that only the text that comes out through the negotiations would be put up at the high-level meeting.

“This is a matter of good faith. It is about the sanctity of the text that has come through the negotiations,” India’s negotiator Vijai Sharma said.

The Chinese representative said the developing countries would not allow any “hidden agenda” to be implemented.

Rasmussen was forced to clarify that there would not be any attempt to impose a draft agreement from outside the negotiation process and that the host country had not circulated any draft till now.