By Daniel Nelson

 

Attempts to agree global measures to tackle climate change at a summit in Copenhagen in December are faltering, David King, former chief scientific adviser to the British Government, warned yesterday.

 

President Barack Obama had put US policy back on track, King told the World Conference of Science Journalists in London, but other countries – notably Canada and Japan – “are stepping into the breach and blocking progress.”

 

He urged the media to examine why Japan and Canada were adopting this stance. Was Canada’s position, for example, driven by the government’s desire to exploit the country’s extensive reserves of tar sands? Both governments, he noted, had got rid of their scientific advisers.

 

Asked what “Plan B” should be in the event of a collapse of talks or a weak agreement in Copenhagen, King first emphasised the crucial importance of securing a protocol that paved the way for agreement on a significant decrease in carbon emissions.

 

“A poor protocol would be the worst outcome,” he said. As a precaution against such an eventuality, a lawyer in his team was working “behind the scenes” to find a legal formula that would enable the summit to be concluded with a general statement and a commitment that a protocol would follow in 2010: “We shouldn’t see December 2009 as an absolute end point,” he counselled.

 

“Plan C” would be a declaration by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (“who is a visionary”) and another remarkable world leader, President Obama, that they shared a common objective on this issue. If they were backed by, for instance, India and the European Union, this would be a “significant position”.

 

King said he was optimistic that agreement could be reached on how to bring forests forests into an international agreement, because there was now greater understanding of the role of deforestation in climate change and because the Brazilian Government had promised to stop all deforestation by 2025.

 

“I’m pleading for that kind of negotiation,” King said, where governments showed their cards openly instead of holding back in an attempt to gain the maximum national advantage. Brazil’s “tremendous response … means deforestation is firmly on the agenda of Copenhagen”.