Copenhagen ended without an agreement but a lot of progress has been made, so we shouldn't be too discouraged.

For the first time ever, specific proposals have been discussed to fund REDD (reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation) and there's widespread support from many countries to put a price on the preservation and rehabilitation of the rainforests, and to allocate funds to do so.

The "accord" presented (a five-page draft document presented by the UNFCC without specific signatories and certainly not ratified) contains a statement of funding REDD with up to $30 billion during the period prior to the expiry of Kyoto (i.e. 2010-2012) and setting up a "Copenhagen Green Climate Fund" that will put together up to $100 billion per year by 2020 to "address" the needs of developing countries.

This so-called accord is remarkably unspecific, but the explicit inclusion of REDD in all this is very good news.

The devil is in the detail and all of it is missing. It's not clear where this money is going to come from and how it's going to be spent, when and if put together, and in particular the REDD scheme needs a detailed protocol of verification and disclosure so that it achieves the right objective. We are not there yet.

This accord was put together in haste pressumably in the early hours of Friday morning and tweaked by world leaders during the day, and by all accounts it's a very sloppy document, containing meaningless statements such as the intention of keeping global warming under 2C (I am afraid we don't have such supernatural powers or control over the laws of physics). The Appendix contains a table of emission reduction targets for 2020 and it is tellingly blank. A statement of intentions that emission reductions would be worked out sooner rather than later during 2010 would have reassured the markets.

The first predictable reaction to this uncertainty has been a nose-dive in the price of carbon. The long term damage is that carbon markets are left to their own without any clear sense of direction.

Copenhagen has shown that the UN can always be counted on to mount a circus, and a very slow moving one. Perhaps this demonstrates that  serious climate change agreement can only happen outside of this framework.  After all, world leaders haven't taken this meeting seriously, only showing up in the last minute and trying to dash off a poorly structured document just to save face.

Actually one can say that we don't need the nearly 200 countries that took part in Copenhagen to agree on a consistent and strong climate change treaty. We just need to put together the top 10 emitters around a table and agree on specific emission cuts and the logistics -and  costs- of how to achieve them. The agreement will be global, but to be blunt, we don't particularly need to know the opinion of countries whose emissions are negligible - the emissions game has relatively few players. And more to the point, we certainly do not need the oil/gas rich countries to sit around the table determined to derail the talks, as has happened in Copenhagen.

The challenge in all this is to get the US to extricate itself from the financial interests of the oil industry. It is difficult. We already know that we will never persuade the likes of Saudi Arabia or Russia to support global decarbonisation and turn the taps off. Decarbonisation will only happen by addressing energy policy consistently and creating capacity for low-carbon energy, effectively reducing demand for fossil fuels as much as possible (the supply side is not something we can aspire to change).

Mikel Susperregi