From a sheer climate protection perspective, various experts claim that the outcome of the Copenhagen climate conference has been a failure. Yet politically, it remains unclear whether Copenhagen can be called a failure, or whether it can be called a step forward. This, it seems, much depends on the regional and national perspectives. Two months after the Copenhagen climate summit, this paper sheds some light on the different regional and national evaluations of the conference and analyzes how perceptions on the outcome of the conference vary between key countries and regions.

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Failure or Opportunity?
A Regional Analysis of the Copenhagen Climate Conference and How Its Outcome Has Been Perceived

By Tilman Santarius, Gudrun Benecke, Thomas Fatheuer, Chen Jiliang, Arne Jungjohann, Ingrid Spiller, Sanjay Vashist, Jorge Villareal


Table of Content

1. The hopes were high ...
2. Regional analysis
2.1  Don’t overstrain the home audience: tailwind from Copenhagen for the United States
2.2  Easy play for Brazil: nothing to loose, only to win
2.3  No deal is better than a bad deal: China gets some blame
2.4  Not successful in selling it as a success: India between all chairs
2.5  “There is always a George”: Full-fledged frustrations in the European Union
2.6  On the road to COP16: Mexico inherits the job to do
3 The real challenge has just begun