UN chief hails New York climate summit success

UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon said that the chances of a global climate change deal being agreed later this year had increased significantly following yesterday's high-profile summit in New York.

Speaking at the close of the one-day summit, which was called to provide fresh impetus to the stalled Copenhagen negotiations, Ban said the meeting had delivered important progress ahead of December's crucial climate meeting in Copenhagen where a successor to the existing Kyoto Agreement is expected to be finalised.

"While the summit is not the guarantee that we will get the global agreement, we are certainly one step closer to that global goal today," he said. "Finally, we are seeing a fall in some of the frozen positions that have prevented governments from moving forward."

Ban's optimism was largely the result of fresh commitments from Chinese president Hu Jintao who told the meeting that the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases would set a target to reduce the carbon intensity of its economy by a "notable margin".

He also committed to planting new forests across an area the size of Norway, and producing 15 per cent of the country's energy needs from renewables by 2020. However, he stopped short of announcing detailed emissions targets or investment plans, raising the prospect that China will wait until the Copenhagen meeting to fully announce its plans.

The move prompted praise from many of the negotiators involved in the Copenhagen talks, who have long argued that action from China is essential if a global deal is to be reached. Former US vice president Al Gore hailed China's " impressive leadership", while UK energy and climate change secretary Ed Miliband said that Hu's speech represented "a big deal" for the negotiating process.

There were also similarly encouraging announcements from Japan's newly elected prime minister Yukio Hatoyama, who pledged to cut emissions by 25 per cent by 2020 and increase funding for clean technologies in developing countries. Meanwhile, French president Nicolas Sarkozy proposed an additional meeting of major emitters in November to thrash out some of the finer details surrounding the Copenhagen negotiations.

However, opinion remained divided on the overall success of the meeting, after US president Barack Obama's highly anticipated speech met with a lukewarm response. The president reiterated his commitment to tackling climate change and hailed US progress in developing clean technologies and new environmental regulations. But with the Senate still debating the proposed US climate change bill, he failed to offer any more detailed commitments, beyond a pledge to work for the phasing out of fossil fuel subsidies at this week's G20 meeting in Pittsburgh.

The US chief climate change negotiator Todd Stern also poured cold water on some of the optimism surrounding China's commitment to set carbon-intensity targets, noting that the significance of the move "depends on what the number is ". Moreover, the proposal in the US climate bill to cut emissions back to 1990 levels by 2020 still falls well short of China's demand for rich nations to deliver cuts in emissions of up to 40 per cent by the same date.

Environmental groups and green businesses were left largely disappointed by proceedings with many now resigned to the fact that detailed proposals will not emerge until the Copenhagen meeting in December.

Richard Gledhill, partner in PwC's Sustainability & Climate Change practice, said that businesses were still waiting for clarity over what the final Copenhagen Agreement will look like.

"The UN's objective was to focus world leaders on the urgent need for action, and mobilise the political will to deliver an ambitious global deal in Copenhagen," he said. "At best, it's probably a work in progress. But business needs more substance from the meetings in Pittsburg."

He also echoed the US view that it was too early to judge China's commitment to set carbon targets. “We certainly got a clear declaration of intent from president Hu Jintao – the promise of emission-intensity targets is a real step forward," he observed. "But there was no measure of the scale of China's ambition in president Hu's speech - just how big is "a notable margin" in China today? No doubt he was keeping his powder dry for the hard negotiations to come. "

Meanwhile, Asad Rehman, senior international climate campaigner at Friends of the Earth, criticised Obama's speech as "a huge missed opportunity" that failed to break the "logjam" in the negotiating progress.

His comments were echoed by executive director of Greenpeace John Sauven, who said that, while welcome, China's announcement was too vague to mark "the major breakthrough we hoped for".