Slow progress is being made at little-noticed Copenhagen follow-up

Hardly anyone has noticed, but international climate negotiations have resumed in formal session for the first time since the Copenhagen summit last December. Six months after failing to seal a deal in the Danish capital, despite much optimism when the summit opened, the negotiators are trying to get the process back on track in time for the next major conference in Cancun, Mexico, at the end of the year.

The good news is that the atmosphere is much better than in Copenhagen. Mind you, it could hardly be worse, than at that rancorous, chaotic, atrociously organised and disastrously chaired occasion. But even so there is a remarkable amount of goodwill around, especially given where things broke off just before Christmas. One sign of that is that much of the Copenhagen Accord, the last-minute agreement personally hammered out by the leaders on the summit’s last day, is being quietly merged with the formal UN negotiating text: a clash between the proponents of the two dragged on into extra time through the night after summit was supposed to have ended, threatening to turn admitted disappointment into indisputable disaster. Meanwhile, most of the negotiating countries – representing 80 per cent of world carbon dioxide emissions – have signed up to it.

The bad news is that there are still deep differences between developed and developing countries. The Third World wants industrialised nations to pledge to make bigger emissions cuts faster. They, and particularly the United States, have responded by demanding better monitoring and verification of developing country measures to fulfill the often impressive promises they have made to tackle their own emissions. On the other hand, good progress has been made on working out ways of rewarding tropical rainforest countries for keeping their trees standing, and on transferring clean, green technologies from rich to poor.

But the main issue is money – most immediately the $30 billion promised by the leaders at Copenhagen to help the poorest adapt to the effects of global warming. Some $28 million of this has now been pledged – chiefly from Japan ($11 billion), the European Union ($9.6 billion), the US ($5.1 billion), Norway ($1.8 billion) and Australia ($500 million). $25 billion of this looks like being grants, rather than loans, but – critically – how much of it is new money rather than funds switched from existing aid budgets is unclear. And when will it start to flow?

There look like being two more negotiating meetings – in August and September/October – before everyone assembles again in Mexico. No-one is expecting a treaty to be concluded then; most would settle for steady, if slow progress, without the dramas of Copenhagen. Whether that will be enough to get global warming under control in time, is another, if unknown, matter.