The Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012 and its successor will be determined next year in Copenhagen. There is every sign that Copenhagen 2009 will not be ambitious enough to tackle climate change.

The UN is convening under the Framework Convention on Climate Change next month in Poland to discuss an action plan, following the "Bali action plan" for a framework of cooperation and mitigation that will pave the way to the Copenhagen treaty.

In preparation for this meeting, a UN working group has published a document that puts together the submissions of different countries, their expectations and wish-lists of what the future agreement should be like. The document is not very encouraging reading. As everything with the UN, a gigantic slow-moving organization, whose policies have a decades-lag of where we ought to be to see to the current needs, the document is a toned-down and unambitious action plan that is the outcome of putting together many conflicting interests.

The document suggests a "level of stabilization" of 2^oC for the global temperature increase, and states that we should make sure that temperature rises do not exceed 2.4^oC. This is amusing. We hope the UN knows that we do not have any control over temperature rises, not least because we cannot even predict them with entire certainty. We have in principle control over the level of greenhouse gas emissions, but not over how our atmosphere will react to this and the temperature increase that will follow.

Furthermore, emission cuts will diminish the rate of warming of our planet, but the temperatures will continue increasing over time for as long as the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere (currently 430 ppm) remains high. Therefore the concept of any "level of stabilization" makes no scientific sense until the concentration of CO₂ returns to a sustainable level. In order to achieve that, we need to go beyond emission cuts and deep into the territory of carbon capture.

The document also discusses that the concentration of CO₂ should be kept below 450 ppm for as long as possible. However it is entirely possible that even within the current projected emission cuts, we will reach this level in about 10-20 years, at any rate much before 2050.

Norway makes the encouraging suggestion of offering financial help to tropical countries who commit themselves to halt deforestation. The importance of this is enormous. The document also makes the important point that rainforest restoration as a form of carbon capture is to be encouraged. We very much believe that it ought to be a key ingredient of the future agreement.