Tag: Copenhagen Summit

There is a seat for Europe at the world talks table, but European leaders need to become more strategic and revisit the successful approach of the EU's founding fathers, Stanley Crossick, the founding chairman of the European Policy Centre, told EurActiv in an interview.

"What role could the EU play to obtain a more successful outcome in Mexico [than in Copenhagen]?" asks Eberhard Rhein, a lecturer at the Mediterranean Academy for Diplomatic Studies in Malta, in a January post on Blogactiv.

The results of the Copenhagen conference on climate change have produced mixed feelings among leaders and nations. Christian Egenhofer and Anton Georgiev, researchers at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), clarify in a December paper the implications of the accord for climate change, global governance and the EU's world leadership role.

The UK is "working to make it possible for the EU to raise its offer to 30%" emission reductions, wrote UK Energy Minister Ed Miliband in an op-ed sent to EurActiv, in which he outlines the deal that the UK would like to see come out of the Copenhagen summit at the end of this week.

As they attempt to construe solutions that will halt global warming, heads of state and government should resist the temptation to attack the legislation in place on intellectual property, writes Mark Esper, executive vice-president of the US Chamber's Global Intellectual Property Center, in a December post.

EU leaders have definitely given up on the idea that the Copenhagen conference will immediately deliver legally-binding measures to fight climate change and are instead asking for a six-month roadmap to reach a definitive deal after the UN summit, according to draft European Council conclusions seen by EurActiv.

The overwhelming majority of EU citizens consider climate change as a serious problem and call for more action against global warming. More than one third of Americans say instead that climate change is not an issue, and only a minor percentage think that it is the consequence of human activity, international polls reveal.

"We have no alternative. We must handle climate change and we must do it right now. Copenhagen is the deadline. Time is up," writes former Danish Climate and Energy Minister Connie Hedegaard, the EU's commissioner-designate for climate action, in an exclusive op-ed for EurActiv.

There has been a sharp decline over the past year in the percentage of Americans who say there is solid evidence that global temperatures are rising, while fewer consider global warming as a very serious problem, according to the Pew Research Center For The People And The Press.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has the potential to remove 90% of the CO2 emissions from coal-fired power stations, writes UK State Secretary for Energy and Climate Change Ed Miliband ahead of December's UN summit in Copenhagen.

In a commentary sent to EurActiv, UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband calls on EU leaders to show more ambition in their efforts to close a new UN-sponsored climate treaty this December and suggests that EU countries embark on a new "environmental union".

At the World Water Week conference, held last week (16-22 August) in Sweden, political leaders and experts called for water to be a key part of the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this December.

The climate regime adopted at Kyoto have hindered sustainable development in Africa, argues Araya Asfaw, director of the Horn of Africa Regional Environment Centre at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia,  in a March opinion paper for  the Science and Development Network (SDN), arguing that the rules of the game must change in Copenhagen.

The Danish Presidency is confident that the European Council can complete the enlargement negotiations with the 10 candidate states prior to or during the Copenhagen summit on 12-13 December. However, intense bargaining is foreseen until the very last minute.