China, India helped draft ‘Danish text,’ insider says

In public at least, the early days of the climate summit here have been dominated by developing nations’ furor over a proposed “Copenhagen Agreement” that leaked to environmentalists and reporters Tuesday.

But many developing nations -- including China and India -- in fact had a hand in drafting the “Danish text,” a source with deep knowledge of the negotiations said today.

Developing countries including China, India, Brazil, Algeria, Ethiopia and Bangladesh had “input into the process and product” of the proposed agreement, the source said.

Representatives of those nations knew about the agreement’s most controversial provisions, including commitments for greenhouse gas reductions by developing countries and a reduced role for the United Nations in climate policy, well before the summit began. It was unclear if everyone in the room agreed to every provision.

The proposal sparked breathless global press coverage; loud protests in the Bella Center, where negotiators are gathered; and a run of outraged press conferences, all from poor nations and nonprofit groups that work closely with them, who complained that the draft provisions would penalize developing nations to the benefit of wealthy countries such as the United States and Denmark.

The Danish text “robs developing countries of their just and equitable and fair share of the atmospheric space,” Lumumba Di-Aping, the Sudanese chairman of a coalition of developing nations and China, told reporters earlier this week.

The World Wildlife Fund’s Kim Carstensen said the text “reflects a too elitist, selective and non-transparent approach.”

Summit leaders have called the proposal informal and one of several drafts circulating among negotiators.

Though they have pledged to reduce their greenhouse gas output as a share of their economies, China, India and other developing countries have long resisted including any binding developing-world emissions reductions in a climate agreement.

One of the goals for wealthy-nation negotiators in Copenhagen is to find a way to include developing-nation reduction targets in an agreement with some level of formality -- and the “Danish text” appears to make a first attempt at that compromise language.