UN Climate Change Summit Concludes with Mixed Results

On December 11, 2011, delegates at the United Nations climate change summit in Durban, South Africa (formally, the 17th Conference of the Parties, or COP17), reached agreement on a new international legally binding regime to regulate carbon emissions that will go into effect in 2020. Additionally, delegates agreed to launch the Green Climate Fund by 2020, and to establish a second commitment period for limiting greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol.

The COP17 summit had been scheduled to end on December 9, 2011. However, delegates took the unprecedented step of extending the end of the conference by 36 hours to continue impassioned debates that led to a new agreement to regulate carbon emissions. The Kyoto Protocol, set to expire in 2012, has widely been considered insufficient because it does not apply to the three largest producers of greenhouse gas—the U.S., India, and China—that collectively account for almost half of the world’s carbon emissions. According to the December 11 agreement, which is being referred to as the Durban Platform, the new protocol will be finalized by 2015 and it will take effect in 2020. The U.S. has agreed to participate in negotiating a new climate agreement but it is currently unknown whether the government will actually ratify the binding agreement that is to be finalized by December 2015. Delegates agreed that, in the interim, the Kyoto Protocol will be extended under a second commitment period. Despite this agreement, securing governmental commitments to lower greenhouse gas emissions remains in doubt. Just recently Canada, one of the members of the Kyoto Protocol, announced it will withdraw from the protocol.

The delegates’ agreement on the Green Climate Fund, a $100 billion fund designed to finance carbon emissions reduction projects in developing countries, is viewed as one of the more significant achievements of the COP17 summit. The Fund is scheduled to begin financing projects in 2020. Funds are not currently in place, however, and delegates did not develop a plan for collecting the money that will be used as funding.

Several questions remain about the Durban Platform. For example, while the new carbon emissions agreement is intended to have “legally binding consequences," it remains to be seen what these consequences will entail. Further, the length and details of the Kyoto Protocol second commitment period were not established. These questions and others will be addressed at the next U.N. climate change summit, scheduled to take place November 26, 2012 to December 7, 2012, in Doha, Qatar.