Danish police stopped an unauthorized demonstration on a second day of street protests over climate change, as environment ministers met for informal talks to advance negotiations on a new pact.
More than 200 activists detained Sunday
Danish police stopped an unauthorized demonstration on a second day of street protests over climate change as environment ministers met for informal talks to advance negotiations on a new pact.
Police stopped an unauthorized demonstration headed toward the city's harbor and carried out a security check of some of the participants, Copenhagen police spokesman Flemming Steen Munch told.
The hundreds of demonstrators were outnumbered by police officers in riot gear who surrounded them. Steen Munch said police found bolt-cutters and gas masks when they searched a truck that led the demonstration. At least 200 activists were detained, he said.
Police said only 13 of the 968 people detained during and after a mass rally Saturday in Copenhagen remained in custody Sunday. Of those, three — two Danes and a Frenchman — were set to be arraigned in court on preliminary charges of fighting with police.
An estimated 40,000 people joined the mostly peaceful march toward the suburban conference center where the 192-nation UN climate conference is being held.
Riot police detained activists at the tail end of the demonstration when some of them started vandalizing buildings in downtown Copenhagen. Windows were broken at the former stock exchange and the Foreign Ministry.
Critics blasted the Danish law that allows police to make preventative arrests if they believe a demonstration will turn violent and hold suspected troublemakers for up to 12 hours without a court arraignment.
"They have arrested 1,000 people. And they only followed up on three of them," Amnesty spokeswoman Ida Thuesen said. "There are lot of people who haven't done anything and had no intention of doing anything."
The conference took a day off Sunday, though more than 40 environment ministers were meeting for informal talks at the Danish Foreign Ministry on greenhouse emissions cuts and financing for poor nations to deal with climate change.
The pledges on emissions cuts so far are short of the minimum proposed in a draft agreement to keep temperatures from rising to a dangerous level.
968 detained in Copenhagen climate march
As of Sunday morning, only a handful of the 968 detained during Saturday's climate demonstrations in Copenhagen were still behind bars.
The march towards the conference center, where the UN climate change conference is being held, was part of the global "Day of Action" of the climate rallies from Australia to the United States.
Dancers, drummers and people with banners proclaiming: "There is no planet B" were demonstrating for "a global will for urgent and effective action on climate change at this time".
However at one stage, violence flared at the tail end of the demonstration, when masked protestors threw cobblestones through the windows of the historic stock exchange and Foreign Ministry buildings.
According to AP, a police officer received minor injuries when he was hit by a rock thrown from the group, and one protester was injured by fireworks, police spokesman Flemming Steen Munch said.
The police rounded up 968 in a preventive action against a group of youth activists. As of Sunday morning, only a handful was still detained.
Climate negotiations change gears
A bright green flame of hope has been lit by citizens, activists and NGOs, the Danish prime minister says.
According to AFP, a select group of environment ministers from 48 countries meet already on Sunday to pore over a draft deal.
Late Saturday, the COP15 President Connie Hedegaard described the procedural advances in the first six days as "fantastic" compared with the situation a couple of months ago.
"The core discussions... have really started," she said according to AFP, adding that "we still have a daunting task in front of us over the next few days."
The Danish prime minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen (photo above) is enthusiastic as well. "A bright green flame of hope has been lit by citizens, activists and NGOs", the Danish prime minister says.
"In less than a week, I believe we will achieve global agreement on climate change," he told the audience at the conference "Bright Green" arranged by the Confederation of Danish Industry.
African Union threatens to scuttle a deal
African Union climate negotiator Meles Zenawi has sought Chinese and Indian backing if the African demands are not being taken seriously.
According to Bloomberg, Meles had received assurances from Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in a telephone conversation earlier this week that China won’t sign any climate change agreement in Copenhagen unless African demands for compensation for the effects of global warming are met.
On emissions, lots of progress has been made, Meles says. According to AFP, his primary worry is about funding.
According to Voice of America, Meles would stop in Paris and London for talks with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown before heading to Copenhagen. Here, he would seek assurances that the offer pledged by European countries would be what he called "real money" and not an illusion.
(Photo of Ethiopia's President Girma Wolde Giorgis (C) and Prime Minister Meles Zenawi (L) on their arrival at a farewell ceremony for the Ethiopian delegation leaving for Copenhagen
Donors want World Bank to manage Bangladesh climate fund
The Bangladesh delegation demands allocation from any climate change adaptation fund in proportion to the percentage of its population exposed to climate change.
"The climate change adaptation fund has to be created by mandatory contribution of developed countries as over and above their usual overseas development assistance fund," Hasan Mahmud told at a press conference, according to Asia News Network.
Mahmud, who is leading the Bangladesh delegation at the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen, stressed that more or less one billion people are affected in the world due to climate change and at least 15 percent of them live in Bangladesh.
When the fund offered to Bangladesh by development partners on bilateral basis to fight climate change becomes operational, the government might let the World Bank manage the fund for a short term as per a condition set by the development partners, said the stateminister.
Scientists: Climate talks aim too low for target
The cuts in greenhouse gases offered at the 192-nation climate conference are "clearly not enough" to assure the world it will head off dangerous global warming, a key UN-affiliated scientist said Saturday.
Such projections, moreover, don't even account for the "potentially hugely important" threat of methane from the Arctic's thawing permafrost, other researchers said.
Midway through the two-week UN conference, richer nations are offering firm reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases ranging from 3-4 percent for the US to 20 percent for the European Union, in terms of 2020 emission levels compared with 1990.
One authoritative independent analysis finds the aggregate cuts amount to 8-12 percent. But the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes (IPCC), the UN-sponsored science network, recommends that reductions average in the 25-40-percent range to keep global temperature increases below 2 degrees C (3.6 F) above preindustrial levels and head off the worst of global warming.
"I think it is clearly not enough," the IPCC's Thomas Stocker said of the numbers discussed here. "We are by far short of having security that the 2-degree target will be met."
The Swiss physicist heads the IPCC's Working Group I, the climate science group that, among other things, assesses the impact that emissions — from fossil-fuel burning, deforestation and other sources — have on concentrations of global-warming gases in the atmosphere and then on temperatures.
Stocker told reporters the IPCC-recommended target "may be too much to ask at this stage" — too politically daunting to achieve in the current annual conference. But he suggested climate talks should aim at longer-term commitments, over decades, not the short commitment periods envisioned in the annual conferences.
Even limiting the temperature rise to 2 degrees C would not forestall serious damage, the IPCC chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, told reporters. "We would get sea-level rise, through thermal expansion alone, of 0.4 to 1.4 meters" (1.3 feet to 4.5 feet), he said.
Climate science co-chair Stocker acknowledged that IPCC projections do not include the potential "tipping point" addition of trapped methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that would be released as permafrost thaws in the far north.
Source> http://en.cop15.dk/news/view+news?newsid=2963
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