The UN “COP 15” climate conference opened today with the expectations of people around the world now resting on the shoulders of their international representatives.  At the opening ceremony Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen told delegates, "the world is depositing hope with you for a short while in the history of mankind.”

To provide an overview of developments leading up to Copenhagen, key negotiations and sticking points, we set out below some of the background and elements necessary for success.  Success itself now covers a spectrum of possible outcomes, but UK minister Ed Miliband, speaking to BBC's Radio 4 Today programme, said, "we are going for something very big.  I don't think it is guaranteed that we will succeed, but we will do everything we can in the next two weeks not just to get a deal but to get a deal that is consistent with the science."

Background to negotiations
It is two years since the international community (in the form of the UNFCCC), at COP 13 in Bali, set itself the deadline to reach agreement at Copenhagen on a post-2012 international climate change regime.  Since then there has been an awful lot of talk, in a total of eleven weeks of preparatory negotiations, the inauguration of a new US President who on election night highlighted one of his main challenges as "a planet in peril", (nearly) the first "climate change general election" in Australia, which is still a plausible scenario in 2010, the publication of much new scientific research, analysis from the International Energy Agency that each year's delay of meaningful action on climate change will add $500bn to mitigation costs between now and 2030, evidence against the backdrop of recession and financial crisis that, notably in the US, the climate issue has fallen down the list of peoples' priorities, and climate change sceptics becoming increasingly more vocal about what they regard as unproven science.

National commitments and pledges
More recently, a succession of developed and developing countries have been lining up to place pledges of mid-term (2020) goals on the table:

• The EU was first off the starting-blocks by passing legislation in 2008 that agreed to a 20% reduction in GHG emissions below 1990 levels, rising to 30% in the event of an international agreement;
• Japan's new government has pledged 25% in reductions against 1990 levels, conditional on an international agreement;
• the US has now formalised the Waxman-Markey bill target into a pledge of a reduction of 17% against 2005 levels;
• Australia has pledged a cut of 25% below 2000 levels in the event of an international agreement; a cut of 5-15% without an agreement;
• Canada, now a massive 30% above its Kyoto target, has promised a mid-term cut of 20% below 2006 levels;
• New Zealand has pledged between 10-20% compared with 1990 levels;
• Norway has made the most ambitious pledge, between 30-40% against 1990;
• even Russia has increased its offer by setting a target of 25% compared with 1990 levels (although, owing to the scale of industrial collapse in the 90s, this would actually mean an increase in emissions from the present date);
• developing countries have also been making pledges, although these would be in the form of slowing emissions growth as opposed to accepting a binding target. Most conspicuously, China recently announced a carbon intensity (emissions per unit of GDP) reduction of 40-45% by 2020 compared with 2005 levels;
• India has followed suit by announcing on 3 December a carbon intensity target of 20-25% against 2005;
• Brazil has pledged to curb its emissions growth by 38% compared with the predicted 2020 number, in effect taking its emissions back to 1990 levels;
• Indonesia, South Korea (still oddly in the developing countries bracket within the UNFCCC) and Mexico have also all announced significant cuts in emissions compared with business-as-usual projections.

The dividing issues in brief
All this coalesces into a feeling, echoed by Martin Wolf in the Financial Times last week, that the world may be close to taking real collective action on climate change.  However, the big dividing issues basically remain as they were two years ago:

• ambitious enough binding targets from developed countries, including the United States;
• significant commitments and actions by developing countries, under the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities;
• major wealth transfers from the developed to the developing world, to help developing countries adapt to the impacts of climate change and to reflect the developed world's primary historical responsibility for creating the global warming problem.

And beneath these there are the (still important) second-order issues:

• the future of market mechanisms, ie the Clean Development Mechanism and Joint Implementation plus possible new mechanisms embodied in the sectoral approach, which may be crucial to the development of a global carbon market;
• enhancing action on adaptation;
• addressing deforestation (responsible for 17% of global emissions) and conserving forests, and whether an international market mechanism can be introduced to support objectives in this area;
• how to facilitate clean energy technology transfer and handle the issue of intellectual property rights within that.

Hopes for success
There was a sense at the last preparatory meeting in Barcelona in early November that the national negotiators were bumping up against their limits on the big issues and that they would have to refer up to their political masters.  With heads of government in Copenhagen not arriving until later in the second week, the first week may still struggle to produce any significant progress.

But if Copenhagen is to be a "success", the definition of which probably has to include fast and meaningful action plus a commitment to secure a detailed and comprehensive agreement in 2010, there will need to be major progress on finance; the gap in trust between the developed and developing world will need to be closed.  In the meantime negotiators may have to burn a lot of midnight oil.