World climate summit in Copenhagen: What are the chances of success for a global climate agreement?

At the world climate summit in Copenhagen in December 2009, a global climate agreement will be negotiated. Will the conference create structures that will enable an efficient and low-cost climate protection? According to Hubertus Bardt, Cologne Institute for the German Economy, the decisive factor is to achieve the climate protection goals with the lowest costs. If we wish to practice internationally a maximally efficient climate protection, measures for preventing greenhouse gas emissions should be implemented in areas where this is cheapest in terms of each preventable unit of emission. Often these possibilities are in developing and emerging economies, whereas in the climate-policy active industrialised countries economical avoidance potentials have been largely already exhausted. A new international climate agreement must thus contribute to achieving the globally most favourable avoidance potentials. Ottmar Edenhofer, Brigitte Knopf and Gunnar Luderer, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, identify three measures for a sensible architecture of climate policy: 1) in an agreement about the amount of carbon that can be stored in the atmosphere by the end of the century; 2) in the distribution of the emissions rights based on a fair distribution key for all nations and 3) in the creation of the institutional requirements for a global emissions trade. For Sabine Schlacke, University of Bremen, the "if" and "whether" of a post-Kyoto agreement seems to be "more than uncertain presently". A failure of the international negotiations could, however, also open up the possibility of thinking about a systemic change in the international architecture of climate protection.