INLSA

Ban Ki-moon, UN secretary general. Picture: Jacques Naude

The COP17 climate summit in Durban finally delivered a set of agreements, to be known as the Durban Platform, well into “injury time” in the early hours on Sunday.

The deal from the summit, which was scheduled to have ended on Friday evening, was brokered through a last-minute compromise about the wording of the text that will for the first time commit all nations to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions from 2020.

This will include the world’s three biggest polluters – the US, China and India – which until now have all not been subject to formal restrictions.

The compromise involved getting around objections from some countries like the US to having “legally binding” emissions targets by using the phrase “a protocol, a legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force” for the new deal to be negotiated.

COP17 president Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, SA’s minister of International Relations and Cooperation, said the summit had “taken crucial steps forward for the common good and the global citizenry.

“I believe that what we have achieved in Durban will play a central role in saving tomorrow, today.”

And UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon was also upbeat, saying: “The Durban Platform represents a significant and forward agreement that defines how the international community will address climate change in the coming years.”

The agreement was closely based on a set of proposals put forward at the start of the summit a fortnight ago by the EU, and – crucially – includes a second commitment period for emissions reductions under the Kyoto protocol, which saved it.

But it did not find favour with a number of smaller, less developed and island states, which stand to lose the most from climate-related disasters. However, they did not oppose it in the final plenary session which would have killed it.

And scientists have warned that the agreement still falls significantly short of what is required in scientific terms to have a 50-50 chance of keeping human-induced global-warming to below 2°C above pre-industrial levels – the internationally-agreed goal.

Climate Action Tracker, an independent scientific assessment group, said yesterday that the world was continuing on a pathway to more than 3°C warming, “with likely extremely severe impacts”, and that catching up on this postponed action would be “increasingly costly”.

Jim Leape, head of WWF International, said COP16 in Cancun last year, governments had agreed to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2°C. “But here in Durban, they have utterly failed to live up to that promise.”

At 1am yesterday, Nokoana-Mashabane told the plenary as they were about to deliberate on the final draft text of the agreement that they could “make history” and that they were “already 24 hours into injury time”. “It it is your choice what history you want to make... Of course, the package is not the best we can do – we must and we will do better. For now, it’s important to preserve the integrity of the system and the trust among countries.

“Let us not walk out here tonight to tell the world that we have failed to deliver on their high expectations.”

In her response, Tasneem Essop, head of WWF’s international climate change strategy and of the organisation’s delegation, pointed out that greenhouse gas emissions reached their highest levels this year.

“While negotiators and ministers were sitting behind closed doors, they weren’t hearing the people’s call, inside and outside the venue, to act with urgency. These people, including WWF, are going home and will hold them accountable.”

Independent Democrats environment spokesman Lance Greyling said: ”The global stalemate has tentatively been broken, but in order to ensure progress, developed countries need to show that they are determined to make this work.”