NEXT YEAR'S crucial climate change summit in Copenhagen will be a failure unless it produces a deal on substantial cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, according to a top United Nations official.
Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, was responding at a press conference yesterday to a question about whether he believed Copenhagen would fail if target cuts were not agreed.
"Yes," he said bluntly.
Delegates arriving at the Poznan conference centre were greeted by 10 serenely beautiful ice sculptures of human figures, melting slowly in the unexpected sunshine. Oxfam had encased messages in each of them saying, "Stop Harming . . . Start Helping".
Mr de Boer said the 14th Conference of the Parties to the UN climate change convention - commonly known as "Cop 14" - was a "very important moment of political stocktaking" halfway along the road to Cop 15 in Copenhagen this time next year.
Minister for the Environment John Gormley, who arrived in Poznan last night, described it as a staging post, saying Europe needed to maintain the "tremendous leadership" it had shown in securing agreement on the Bali "road map" last year.
"The most important thing is that we get the deal we want in Brussels [on the EU climate and energy package] this week", Mr Gormley told The Irish Times. "The French are very anxious to get an ambitious programme through and we're fully behind them."
Tracing the history of UN climate negotiations, Mr de Boer said that while the 1997 Kyoto Protocol provided a "very valuable architecture" to deal with global warming, it was only a "modest first step" towards the deeper cuts that scientists say are needed.
In his view, there were three "political essentials" that must be clarified if Copenhagen is to work: the scale of commitments by developed countries; the extent of financial aid to developing countries; and an institutional framework to hold it together.
Looking into his own crystal ball, Mr de Boer said he did not think it was "feasible" that Cop 15 would be able to develop a long-term solution to climate change. Rather, he expected that it would "set a clear overall direction for future global action".
Just as it had taken four years to finalise the details of how the Kyoto Protocol would actually work in practice, he anticipated that Copenhagen would lay down an "ambitious policy framework", leaving the operational details to be worked out later.
Mr de Boer cautioned that the current financial crisis would have an impact on the climate talks, "just as it has had on everything else", but he was optimistic that it could also lead to a cleaner energy future, "ringing in an era of greener economic growth".
A new survey of 1,000 decision-makers in 115 countries, released in Poznan yesterday by Globescan, found that many feared the current economic crisis could hinder progress towards an effective international agreement on climate change.
Although 73 per cent of the respondents believed that it should be possible to achieve "equitable economic growth" in the context of taking measures to deal with global warming, most were pessimistic that this happy marriage would actually happen.
The online survey found widespread support for accelerated action on energy conservation and scrapping fossil fuel subsidies as the two highest priorities to combat climate change and spur economic recovery, with investment in renewables a close third.
An agreement reached yesterday between the European Parliament and the EU Council of Ministers on a renewable energy target of 20 per cent by 2020 was welcomed by Joris den Blanken, of Greenpeace, as an example of "showing leadership".
But Steven Guilbeault, of Canadian environment group Équiterre, accused his own country as well as Japan, Australia and New Zealand of attempting to "wriggle out" of the commitments they had made in Bali to cut emissions by between 25 and 40 per cent.
Meanwhile, in London, the House of Lords EU committee called for the European emissions trading scheme (ETS) to be consolidated and strengthened so that it would assist in achieving the higher levels of emission cuts likely to be required from 2013 onwards.
The shape of a revised ETS is one of the issues to be decided at this week's EU summit in Brussels.