Today is the day that world leaders join the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, and where talk will focus on emissions cuts, carbon trading schemes, the green ambitions for the US and China, it could easily be forgotten that the key to long term development lies in green resources.

Understandably, the conference and the lead up to it focused on the respective positions of the US, India, China and the European nations on immediate emissions cuts and CO2 emissions limits. Across the media the summit has been relayed as a ‘make or break’ fortnight in climate change policy and global warming politics; it must deal first with snap decisions, with catalysts and triggers – with the immediate problem – before it can discuss future development and sustainability.

In doing so, though, it risks losing sight of the climate change problem at its most problematic level: that of future generations. Certainly at current the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit is looking to safeguard future generations by curbing the behaviour of current times, but it must also look to the development of a climate change policy that reflects a continued effort at keeping CO2 emissions.

Green resources are the key to that effort.

Green Resources Develop Continued Low Carbon Economies

In developing a long term goal for low carbon emissions and climate change policy, though, it is imperative that world leaders and environment ministers settle on some framework for green resources – renewable energy, potentially nuclear, and also carbon capture and storage (CCS) – so that any emissions limits put in place at Copenhagen can be sustained and developed.

Whilst green resources are implicit in any emissions cuts at the conference, it must also be remember that – much like the arguments about binding or non-binding emissions targets – green resources can only develop globally with a binding framework. If there’s no binding framework on development and implementation of green resources, then their inclusion and their development is only tacit.

And if their development is only tacit, then their development is slower. And if their development is slower, then the growth of green resources that will help major nation’s transition to low carbon economies is stunted.

Green Resources Must Grow as Part of a Binding Framework

Alongside pledges for emissions cuts at Copenhagen, then, should come a commitment to developing green resources across nations, as a means for achieving low carbon transition and CO2 emissions reductions.

Creating a framework for sustainability and further development too, it ensures that where Copenhagen addresses the needs of the short-term, it also safeguards longer term goals for climate change policy and global warming politics, in years to come.

Let us see then, whether the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference can set such long-term goals, as it struggles to set the short-term ones.