China says “development right” key in climate talks
Reuters
Beijing: China will treat talks on a binding global climate change pact in 2010 as a struggle over the “right to develop”, a Chinese official said, signaling more tough deal-making will follow the Copenhagen summit. The rancorous meeting ended on Saturday with a bare-boned agreement that “noted” a broad accord struck at the last moment between the United States and the big developing countries -- China, India, Brazil and South Africa...

Copenhagen climate deal was backward step - Algeria Minister
Wall Street Journal
Luanda: Algerian Oil Minister Chakib Khelil said Monday that the non-binding agreement struck at the United Nations-sponsored climate change summit in Copenhagen last week was “a backward move.” The minister criticized the deal because it doesn't include the transfer of emissions-reduction technologies from rich countries to developing ones...

WCC says Copenhagen process lacked transparency
Ekklesia
With a lack of transparency, “the agreement reached this past week by some countries in Copenhagen was negotiated without consensus but rather in secret among the powerful nations of the world,” WCC Programme Executive on climate change Guillermo Kerber said yesterday. “This has proven to be a strong strike against multilateralism and the democratic principles in the UN system,” he said...

Failure at such a grand level means we have to act locally
The Guardian
London: Post-Copenhagen, we may be heading towards a future in which no comprehensive successor to the Kyoto regime is politically possible. It is therefore crucial that the centre of gravity of decision-making on how we respond to climate change moves towards the sub-national level. The need for such a shift from “top down” to “bottom up” is becoming clearer by the day...

Some climate experts seek alternative to UN process
New York Times
Copenhagen: The UN global warming summit became a myth long before it happened. By the time it closed with a compromise to acknowledge a US-brokered accord, the two weeks of intrigue, chaos and divisiveness had shattered for many the idealized notion of a global consensus to tackle climate change...

Fred Pearce: Looking for a silver lining in the post-summit landscape
Yale Environment 360
Did British climate secretary Ed Miliband save the planet early on the final Saturday of the Copenhagen conference? It sounds like a risible claim, especially coming from a British journalist like myself. But hear me out. At 7 am on Saturday, with the conference 14 hours into overtime, the visibly exhausted and procedurally confused chairman of the summit, Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, cast a weary eye over the surviving delegates from an all-night session...

New world order set agenda in climate talks
Irish Times
Dublin: Nobody really knows the full story about what happened during the crucial last day of the Copenhagen climate summit; even the participants are still trying to piece it all together. There were so many meetings, involving so few, going on at the Bella Centre that nearly everyone was in the dark, writes Frank McDonald, environment editor: Venezuelan president Huge Chavez could “smell the sulphur”, and he was not alone...

Monbiot: If you want to know who's to blame for Copenhagen, look to the US Senate
The Guardian
London: The last time global negotiations collapsed like this was in Doha, in 2001. After the trade talks fell apart, the World Trade Organisation assured delegates that there was nothing to fear: they would move to Mexico, where a deal would be done. The negotiations ran into the sand of the Mexican resort of Cancún, never to re-emerge...

Miliband: The road from Copenhagen
The Guardian
London: Where do we go from here? That is the question we are all asking ourselves after Copenhagen. We have to begin by understanding the lessons of what went wrong but also recognise the achievements that it secured. This was a chaotic process dogged by procedural games. Thirty leaders left their negotiators at 3am on Friday, the last night to haggle over the short Danish text that became the accord...

The last-ditch drama that saved the deal from collapse
The Guardian
The Copenhagen accord was gavelled through in the early hours of yesterday morning after a night of extraordinary drama and two weeks of subterfuge. It is a document that will shape the world, the climate and the balance of power for decades to come, but the story of how it came into existence is one of high drama and low politics...

UN climate meet showed the old North-South divide outdated
Business Standard
Copenhagen: Beyond the nitty-gritty of emission cuts and technology transfers, the broader significance of the two-week-long United Nations' climate summit in Copenhagen lay in the manner in which it exemplified how the geostrategic contours of the 21st century are shifting. These are contours in flux, not wholly settled but clearly discernable, nonetheless...

Birth of BASIC signals decline of G77?
The Hindu
Together, they have more than 40 per cent of the world's population and are responsible for 10 per cent of the world's economy. Now, they are finally leveraging their considerable power on the world stage by presenting a united front on climate change. The BASIC group - made up of Brazil, South Africa, India and China - was born in the run-up to the UN climate talks at Copenhagen, when Beijing invited Environment Ministers from the three other nations to draft a common platform earlier this month. This fortnight, they have strengthened their relationship with a show of joint strength....

Despite failed climate talks, more green awareness
Inter Press Service
New Delhi: The world supped on an alphabet soup of acronyms over the nearly two weeks of climate change talks that just ended - UNFCCC, COP-15, IPCC, CDM, LDCF, MEF, CCS. But did any of these filter down to reach the average citizen?...

IGNOU to launch programme on climate change
Press Trust of India
New Delhi: With growing focus on global warming, the Indira Gandhi National Open University will launch a programme on climate change from next year. The diploma programme on climate change would be available through all the 2500 IGNOU study centres across the country. “The programme that would be available from 2010 will also look into the Kyoto protocol and the recent Copenhagen summit,” V N Rajasekharan Pillai, Vice Chancellor IGNOU told PTI...

All over the map: Rounding up editorial reax to Copenhagen
Grist
It's too weak! ... No, it was a fool's errand to begin with ... China is to blame! Of course not, it was the United States that brokered a bad deal for the world's poor ... There's no hope ... Progress was made, there's more to do ... Despair ... Hope ... Such was the general tone struck by newspaper editorial boards over the weekend about the climate accord announced late Friday from Copenhagen...

State of the agriculture text at COP, December 18, 2009
IATP
State of the agriculture text at COP at the close of the session, December 18, 2009...

OECD DAC to monitor aid flows in support of climate change adaptation
OECD
Paris: Members of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) have approved a policy marker to track official development assistance in support of climate change adaptation. Adaptation-related aid is defined as activities that aim to reduce the vulnerability of human or natural systems to the impacts of climate change and climate-related risks, by maintaining or increasing adaptive capacity and resilience...