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Copenhagen Climate Conference (COP15)
Category: History & Politics Key figures: Connie Hedegaard (Conference President), Lars Løkke Rasmussen (Danish Prime Minister, host), Barack Obama (United States), Wen Jiabao (China), Manmohan Singh (India), Lula da Silva (Brazil), Jacob Zuma (South Africa)
Summary
The 15th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC COP15) convened at the Bella Center in Copenhagen, Denmark, from December 7 to 18, 2009. The conference was the largest climate summit in history at that time, drawing approximately 115 heads of state and government — a turnout that reflected the exceptional political urgency that had accumulated around climate action in the years following the Kyoto Protocol’s entry into force in 2005.
The central objective of COP15 was to negotiate a legally binding successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol, which covered emissions-reduction commitments only for developed nations through 2012. Expectations were high: civil society groups, scientific bodies, and many governments had invested years of preparatory work in the prospect of a comprehensive, binding framework covering all major emitting nations — including the United States (which had not ratified Kyoto) and large developing economies such as China and India.
The outcome fell substantially short of those expectations. On December 18, the final day, the formal negotiating process broke down; the final plenary could not adopt any agreement. Instead, a last-minute political document — the Copenhagen Accord — was drafted in closed sessions by the leaders of the United States, China, India, Brazil, and South Africa (known as the BASIC-plus-US group). The accord recognized the scientific case for limiting global average temperature rise to below 2°C, pledged $30 billion in near-term climate finance for developing nations rising to $100 billion annually by 2020, and established a framework for countries to submit voluntary emissions targets — but contained no legally binding emission-reduction commitments and no mechanism for enforcement. The conference could only agree to “take note of” rather than formally adopt the accord; several nations, including Bolivia, Venezuela, Sudan, and Tuvalu, openly rejected it.
Significance
COP15 marked a turning point in international climate diplomacy. The failure to produce a binding treaty exposed a fundamental structural tension in the UNFCCC process: developed nations sought legally binding commitments from large emerging economies (primarily China), while those economies insisted on maintaining development flexibility and pointed to the historical emissions of the industrialized world. The exclusion of most UN member states from the final closed-room negotiations also sparked fierce criticism about process legitimacy.
Despite its shortcomings, the Copenhagen Accord established several precedents that shaped subsequent climate negotiations. The below-2°C temperature limit became the organizing target for all future agreements. The pledge-and-review model of voluntary national commitments — rather than top-down legally binding targets — foreshadowed the architecture ultimately adopted in the 2015 Paris Agreement. The $100 billion per year climate finance commitment became a standing political obligation that continued to be negotiated at every subsequent COP.
In the immediate political context of 2009, Copenhagen underscored both the centrality of the US-China relationship to any global climate deal and the difficulty of translating domestic political constraints (particularly in the United States Senate, which had never ratified Kyoto) into international law. It thus stands as one of the defining diplomatic events of the year and of the decade-long effort to build a post-Kyoto climate order.
Sources
- Copenhagen climate summit — Wikipedia
- Copenhagen Accord — Wikipedia
- Summary Report 7–19 December 2009 — IISD Earth Negotiations Bulletin
- FCCC/CP/2009/L.7 — UNFCCC official document (Copenhagen Accord text)