Copenhagen climate change summit opens
Updated on 07 December 2009
After years of preparation and months of speculation, the Copenhagen climate change summit begins but the leaked email controversy has hit the conference floor.
For the next two weeks the challenge facing almost two hundred countries is clear: to do what hitherto has failed, to reverse the rise in carbon emissions and to attempt to hold global temperature increases under two degrees.
It is an opportunity the world cannot afford to miss, say the Danish hosts.
But right from the start the leaked email controversy has hit the conference floor, with the world's top climate scientist defending evidence that global warming is caused by humans after claims British researchers were trying to manipulate the data.
The meeting of 15,000 members will also aim to raise billions of dollars for aid and development of clean technology.
Campaigners hope the two week meeting will reach agreement in order to save the planet from catastrophic climate change.
The summit will have to overcome deep distrust between rich and poor nations about sharing the cost of emissions cuts.
The attendance of world leaders and pledges to curb emissions by all the top emitters - led by China, the United States, Russia and India - have raised hopes for an accord after sluggish negotiations in the past two years.
"Copenhagen is already a turning point in the international response to climate change," said Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat.
World leaders did not attend when environment ministers agreed the existing UN climate pact, the Kyoto Protocol, in 1997.
This time, in a Copenhagen conference hall with wind turbines outside generating clean energy, Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen and Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN's panel of climate experts, will be among speakers at Monday's opening session.
Hopes for the summit
The chief negotiators from the EU, South Africa and the small island states of the world talk to Jon Snow about their hopes for the Copenhagen summit.
Ambassador Dessima Williams, a Grenadian diplomat who is Chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, said: "At two degrees our islands are drowning, we're burning up, we're losing our physical infrastructure, our agriculture. We're small islands and costal countries - we're going under. At two degrees the science suggests we will have a harder time.
"We want to send a message to the US Congress - you've got to act and act at an ambitious level. It's not good enough to stay home and say you can't do it. You have to try."
European Commission's chief climate negotiator, Artur Runge-Metzger, said: "Our pledge is on the table, and it is for other countries to grab it...but we need to make a big jump forward altogether."
He said that to aim to limit temperature increases to 1.5 degrees was "really something for the long-term" and said he was "not sure we can get quickly onto that trajectory altogether".
He admitted he was pessimistic on getting an agreement at this summit. "We from the EU are certainly ready to go that far, but looking at the political realities around us it might be very difficult."
He said that President Obama was showing "political will" by attending the last day of the summit.
Alfred Wills, the chief climate negotiator for South Africa, said: "I'm hopeful that we can reach an agreement here. What we're faced with is not a technical difficulty; we technically could achieve an agreement right here.
"The reality is that what we need to make that happen is the political will."
