Logic has prevailed at the Copenhagen Climate Summit. If after two years of negotiations since lecture in Bali it had not been possible to reach agreement on the major issues at discussion, it did not seem logical that in two weeks all the obstacles could be solved at once.

Spectators may wonder why there is such urgency in closing a agreement when we are talking about setting targets for 2020 and 2050. Among the many reasons that could be cited, the economic ones are certainly not the least.

Globally, many companies have decided to invest in climate change solutions. From renewable energies to management waste or CO2 capture and storage. Carbon markets have been an essential economic incentive for these companies. protocol To date, according to official statistics, some 50 billion euros have been contributed to the purchase of emission reductions in developing countries under the Kyoto Protocol development.

But the Kyoto Protocol protocol expires in 2012 and there is no longer time to receive significant contributions for emission reductions for projects that have not yet been initiated. Until there is a reasonable expectation of a future regime, investors in these projects are going to pull back even more than they were due to the economic crisis. In other words, carbon markets pay little for post-2012 emission reductions in the face of this regulatory uncertainty.

Something similar is happening at the European level. The European Union has the European Emissions Trading Scheme for its industry and has set the ground rules for outline until 2020. However, the total amount of emission allowances to be distributed depends, by the very wording of the Community rule , on the quality of the international agreements that are reached. In other words, the operating forecasts and CO2 supply hypotheses that the most forward-looking European companies prepare will be largely up in the air until an agreement is reached agreement.

Therefore, the delay in a agreement is not only negative because governments will not start to act. It also creates counterproductive legal uncertainty in the economic sectors that provide solutions, whose fundamental levers include regulation and carbon markets.

In this regard, a final thought. At the Climate Summit, it was common to hear criticisms of the functioning and structure of carbon markets, both from the political arena and from non-governmental organizations.

There is no doubt that these instruments are not in themselves the solution to the problem of climate change. Such a heroic task must be tackled by government decision-makers who must reach an agreement on the maximum amount of authorized emissions (carbon assets) and on their distribution, agreement .

On this basis, the markets can do, at best, nothing more than use the assets efficiently, trying to ensure that the emission reductions that governments have deemed necessary are carried out in the most cost-efficient way possible, providing financing to all those projects where it is necessary at any given time, according to the price that CO2 reaches on international markets.

Prosaic or not, this task is essential to provide a monetary incentive to project developers. Particularly in less developed countries, in many of which the establishment of a outline that forces them to depend on governmental bodies can simply block the financing of investments, if not lead to a perverse use of funds.