Essential path from Copenhagen

When leaders from 25 countries, notably the US, China, Brazil, India and South Africa, met at the night before the closing of the Copenhagen Climate Summit to draft an agreement, they did it deliberately away from the all-or-nothing normal procedures of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) which was doomed to end on a deadlock.

It was therefore a desperate compromise based on the belief that any deal is better than no deal. Should these leaders come home empty-handed, the letdown would have been too big for many people around the world to accept.

The resulting document, the Copenhagen Accord, calls for reducing emissions to keep temperatures from rising more than 2C above pre-industrial levels, and that richer nations will finance a $10 billion-a-year, three-year program to fund poorer nations' projects to deal with drought and other impacts of climate change and to develop clean energy. A goal was also set to mobilize $100 billion a year by 2020 for the same adaptation and mitigation purposes.