Brad Sparks, Director, Global Green Initiative, KPMG:
So Zoe, as someone that has attended several of the UN Climate Conferences, what are your observations on what is different this time in Copenhagen?
Dr. Zoe Lees, Sustainability Advisory Services, KPMG in South Africa:
Well I think that probably the major thing that is different is the amount of interest, from civil society partly because the Danish are creating a lot of hype around this meeting, as well as Al Gore popularizing the issue of climate change as well as just the general urgency and the stakeholder, civil society push for some kind of conclusion because of the Kyoto period ending.
So it is obviously a major milestone and as a result it has brought more than a thousand business people to this meeting which is quite unusual and certainly over 110 heads of states which they are expecting by Friday. That is very unusual, that is a record. So essentially the discussions, the amount of pressure that there is, political pressure and so on has made it a very, very different meeting.
The other thing is the complexity of the meeting of the negotiations themselves. The fact that these two tracks, one along the Kyoto protocol track as well as the UNFCCC track, that makes it very complex, and the sort of sticking issues which are around finance, targets - it makes the negotiations… adding the political pressure, the uncertainty on what the outcome is going to be and the urgency with which the countries want all of these things to be addressed, has made it very complex and that is quite unusual for a COP meeting.
Brad Sparks:
So speaking about outcomes. Then I guess - we are at the start of week two. What are some of the possible outcomes and options for the end of this week?
Dr. Zoe Lees:
Well obviously there is a lot of speculation about that, there is quite a lot of uncertainty and not even our own delegations know what the outcome will be. Things change literally every moment. And so there are possibly three of four different possible outcomes.
One of those is that we will have an amended text or agreements for both the Kyoto Protocol as well as the UNFCCC with the UNFCCC particularly giving space for the US to come in with some kind of commitment. That is the one option.
The other option is a completely new protocol. There is a drive by some countries to change the Kyoto protocol completely or actually remove it and replace is with something else - that is the other option. Not necessarily desirable, because it took up to 13 years to actually resolve the provisions of the Kyoto protocol so countries are very uncomfortable about taking that away.
And then the third option, probable option, which is the least likely, or the least desirable is a political agreement, which basically is just architecture for an agreement, and deadlines for certain things to be renegotiated or for the negotiations to continue after the COP and that could be the weakest. So those are sort of broadly the three.