I went to Copenhagen, to fight for a fair, ambitious and legally binding treaty. I went to fight for global democracy.

The global summit on climate change was not just an international conference on the world’s precarious environment. It was a catalyst of rivalries and reciprocal accusations, which gave momentum to a renewed synergy between Brazil, South Africa, India and China.

The UN Conference on Climate Change has started yesterday (7th of December 2009) in the Danish capital. As the Kyoto protocol will terminate by the end of 2012, this summit will be fundamental in order to find a new agreement on climate change. This article analyse the firs two days of the Copenhagen Summit.

For as long as the fight against climate change will be portrayed as an environmental problem, we will continue setting ourselves up for failure. Climate change is not like the ozone layer or the acid rains, it is not just about pollutants. It is about our development model and its profound flaws.

Climate change is not just an environmental issue – global warming affects social justice, poverty, and human rights. There are many discordant voices on how best to tackle climate change and reach a globally just agreement. Here we begin a series of confrontations by looking at the question of the carbon trading scheme, a system set up by the Kyoto protocol to allow companies to buy, sell, and trade pollution certificates.

Carbon trading is a complex system which sets itself a simple goal: tomake it cheaper for companies and governments to meet emissions
reduction targets.

Three weeks from now, Copenhagen will have a decisive impact on climate negotiations. Graciela Chichilnisky has contributed extensively to the Kyoto Protocol process, creating and designing the carbon market that has become international law in 2005. In this article she presents her ideas for a post-Kyoto agreement, stressing the importance of a carbon market as a tool for emissions-reduction.

20 leaders meeting in Singapore cannot steal a decision from the world. Climate change is the most spectacular of demonstrations of the desperate need for a new paradigm of global decision making, intrisically based on multilateralism and reasoning across national interest.

Next December the United Nations Climate Change Conference will take place in Copenhagen. This will be a fundamental summit to find a new international agreement on climate change. The US and the European Union have a central role to play in the negotiations, and a particular responsibility towards developing countries. But political short-sight might transform the appointment into the living proof of the incapacity of today’s leaders to stand up to the global challenges they face.

The two matters dividing Brussels have more in common than may first appear…
Does Europe want a president who will ‘stop the traffic’ and lead the marching band, or a consensual figurehead, something less primus than his pares? Does Europe want to agree a package now and regain its name as a climate and development leader? Or will it sit tight until Copenhagen, and hope to extract concessions from the US before showing its hand?