Copenhagen 'most important meeting since WWII' – Stern
Zurich, 11 September: The UN climate change meeting to be held in Copenhagen next year is the “most important gathering since the Second World War”, according to Nicholas Stern, author of the influential Stern Review on the economics of climate change.

Progress at the climate talks, Stern said, will depend on rapid progress in domestic US climate change legislation, and the response from China. And he warned that failure to reach agreement in Copenhagen would “badly damage” the carbon markets.

The UN climate talks to be held in Copenhagen in December 2009 will mark the culmination of two years of international talks to agree a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires at the end of 2012. Progress in the negotiations – the latest round of which were held in Accra last month – has been painfully slow, raising questions over the future of the international climate regime, and the global carbon markets.

Speaking yesterday at the Sustainability Leadership Symposium, at Rushlikon near Zurich, Stern said that of “crucial importance” to the climate talks “is where the United States goes in the early months of next year with the daughter or son of Warner-Lieberman”, referring to a bill which reached the floor of the Senate last year, that would have imposed an economy-wide cap on US greenhouse gas emissions and introduced a trading scheme.

He noted that the US political process made the rapid passage of a successor bill unlikely, but it “would be clear if it will make it, and what sort of bill it would be”, in the first half of 2009.

“The next president of the US should meet the president of China in the next six months to see how they would come together, because action on both sides will depend on action on the other side,” he said.

He argued that agreement on climate change is more urgent than on trade talks. “This isn’t like a delay in the trade negotiations. It’s a great shame that we as the world messed up in the Doha round, but in … two or three years, we can start again from a similar starting place. If we mess up Copenhagen and nothing much happens for four or five years, we’ll be in a much more difficult place. Delay isn’t neutral,” he said.

“If we mess up, it will be very difficult to put the pieces back together again.”

He added that he’d discussed the issues “at some length” with both the Barack Obama and John McCain presidential campaigns, and “they are all talking the right kind of language”.

In his presentation, he warned that carbon markets could “collapse” if Copenhagen was unsuccessful, but later clarified his comments. “Markets depend on confidence, and rule structures, and if you lose the confidence, and lose the rule structures, you will badly damage the carbon markets," he said.