20091222
allafrica

Johannesburg — NOT for the first time, SA has punched above its weight at a global summit, helping to broker a climate change deal that prevented the Copenhagen summit from turning into a complete flop.

What's become known as the Copenhagen Accord emerged from a meeting on Friday night of representatives of the US, China, India, Brazil - and SA. The meeting, convened by the White House, was a last-ditch attempt to salvage something from the two-week summit, which had run aground essentially because the world's largest greenhouse gas emitters - China and the US - were at odds. SA's support, with India's and Brazil's, was seen as crucial to the compromise that the two powers managed to reach.

In some ways, SA's leading role is not all that surprising. Though developed nations are responsible for the bulk of carbon emissions, it is developing countries that are expected to be worst affected by global warming. And SA has an unusual status not only because it is Africa's largest economy but because, in a sense, it straddles the carbon divide between industrial and developing economies. Though relatively poor, it's the world's 13th-largest producer of carbon dioxide. SA went out on a limb ahead of Copenhagen, offering to reduce emissions by 34% by 2020 and by 42% by 2025 -- as long as it could get financial and technical support from developed countries to do so.

Even so, the politics of SA's role at the summit are interesting -- especially since SA hasn't always been included among the big emerging "Bric" (Brazil, Russia, India and China) markets lately . This time, we clearly were up there with the big players. But were we so thrilled to be included that we went along with a bad deal?

It's easy enough to write off the three-page Copenhagen Accord as a failure. The two-week summit itself was rather a shambles and the accord has been greeted with huge disappointment, even outrage. Though it recognises the need to reduce emissions to prevent temperatures rising, it is simply a statement of intent that doesn't commit the signatories to any binding targets. And even if richer countries were to live up to their promise to cut emissions, this still wouldn't be enough to mitigate the effects of global warming.

Even so, the accord is a big step forward, one that has broken deadlocks on a couple of key issues. One important concession was that China has agreed to submit to a verification system under which all countries will have their emissions monitored. Another is that rich countries have committed to provide 100bn in aid to poorer countries to help them cut emissions and cushion them from global warming.

Crucially too, the accord ensures that talks will continue, with an eye to a follow-up summit in Mexico in a year's time. So it's a work in progress, one whose real outcome will become clear only later.