World leaders gathered for the climate summit finally reached an agreement on Friday night — albeit a legally non-binding one — after hours of gruelling negotiations.
“We have upheld the interests of developing nations and our national sovereignty,” Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh
told
HT.
The details of the deal, which bridged the seemingly insurmountable gap between the positions taken by the developed and developing nations, were not immediately available.
Both Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and US President Barack Obama delayed their departure for hours to work out a compromise.
Singh went into unscheduled discussions with leaders of China, South Africa and Brazil to evolve a strategy
and a common view on the latest draft that had been circulated.
He later met European Union leaders as well.
Obama too went into a flurry of meetings, including two private ones with China’s premier Wen Jiabao.
Earlier, after intense bickering over 12 days and a last-minute call for consensus by world leaders, the Copenhagen climate summit sought to reach global agreement over a draft “political statement”.
The draft said nations should aim at a 2 degrees C limit to global warming by reducing emissions 50 per cent by 2050; a global emission peaking year (without specifying the year); and a payment of $130 billion (Rs 6.1 trillion) by the developed world to the developing to mitigate the impact of climate change and adopt new technologies to counter it, by 2020; and the resolution of differences on the Kyoto Protocol and the long-term cooperative action by 2010 in Mexico.
Climate activists, however, said the steps envisaged in the draft were “not enough to save the planet”. There’s “nothing to cheer about Copenhagen”, said Kumi Naidoo, executive director of non-governmental organisation Greenpeace International, who hails from Africa, likely to be the worst hit by climate change. A Greenpeace analysis damned the draft document, saying it was not “based on latest science” and was “very empty”.
In his speech, Obama called on emerging economies India and China to be more “transparent” in their domestic mitigation actions. “To reach a global accord, we have to hold each other accountable for some commitments,” Obama said.
Both India and China said their domestic mitigation efforts were much more than mandated under the UN’s climate convention.