ABSTRACT
Was Bali a success?2 At the end of the grueling two-week negotiating round, delegates, observers, and press generally gave the agreement that emerged – the Bali “Roadmap” – high marks. We really won’t know whether those marks are deserved, however, until negotiation of the post2012 period is completed, in 2009. Given the dire warnings contained in the IPCC 4th Assessment Report (AR4), released earlier in the year,3 no one can doubt the seriousness of purpose with which negotiators labored. Nevertheless, the decisions taken at COP 13 and COP/MOP 3 have a disconcerting Rorschach quality about them. They are susceptible to a wide range of interpretations, permitting each Party to see what it wants. On the one hand, they reference AR4’s most ambitious short and medium-
term scenarios: 25-40% reductions by 2020 and 80-95% by 2050, with substantial deviation from baseline in most developing country regions.4 On the other hand, the reference to these scenarios in the Bali Action Plan – the centerpiece of the Roadmap – is so oblique that if one did not know where to look, one probably would not find it.
