COPENHAGEN, Denmark — Jamaica’s chief climate negotiator Clifford Mahlung is hopeful that the presence of United States President Barack Obama here this week will help to shore up a comprehensive climate deal that reflects the interest of the world’s poorest countries.

“President Obama coming here, I think it will help. I think it has helped already (as it concerns) the interest in this Copenhagen conference. Coming out of the Barcelona talks, where the developed countries were still being very slow in coming with significant and useful targets, we saw that when the US revised their targets, albeit still not where we expect it to be, that it had a very significant implication in that China and India also came up with significant reduction programmes,” the negotiator, Clifford Mahlung, told the Observer.

“Additionally, the number of heads of states who were expected to be in Copenhagen had started to dwindle after the Asia-Pacific summit. When President Obama stated that he would be here in the first week, we saw the numbers going up. And now that he has changed that to the second week, the numbers have increased significantly,” he added.

Mahlung noted that the presence of heads of states and high-level ministers was especially important since they are the ones who will have to sign off on the greenhouse emission targets for both developed and developing countries, financing, and adaptation.

“Many of these decisions, in terms of the numbers on things like financing, the technocrats can’t put a figure on; it is the heads that usually come with a final figure,” said the man who is also vice-chair of the executive board of the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol. “So it is very important that as many of the heads of state are here. And already we hear that over 110 heads of states have confirmed. So he is already having a positive spin because we know that anywhere he goes he tends to attract a lot more people.”

Obama’s recent receipt of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize stands in testimony to his capacity to unite people while promoting a sense of co-operation. He was awarded for what the Norwegian Nobel Committee described as his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples”.

“The Committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons. Obama has as president created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts,” the committee said in a news release posted on its website.

“Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population,” it added.

But there is at least one thing that stands in the way of Obama’s ability to make significant inroads during the remaining week of negotiations — his Climate Change bill which has yet to get the US Senate’s approval.

“So far it has had the approval of the House of Representatives but it has not gone to the Senate and that is delayed because of a number of reasons, one of them being the long time it is taking for the health care bill to be debated. So obviously the Senate will not make a decision until after Copenhagen, which means that the US cannot come forward fully engaged because they still need to get the Senate’s approval and that could be a reason why we may not have the full outcome in Copenhagen. We may have to deal with it, hoping that we will have a positive outcome from the Senate,” Mahlung told the Observer.

Still, he noted that there are possible ways around it.

“Heads could still decide, the US could be bold and we could have a very strong, ambitious agreement here in Copenhagen. But if not, we have to ensure that whatever we leave Copenhagen with, we carry the momentum forward to the spring and will actually lock parties into whatever we agree to. [That way] there will be no great deviation come the spring when the US bill is cleared and we can move to a very good agreement,” Mahlung said.

In June this year the US House of Representatives voted 219 to 212 to bind the country to cutting emissions by 17 per below 2005 levels by 2020 and by 83 per cent by 2050. The 1,200-page bill requires, among other things, US companies to produce 15 per cent of their electricity from wind and solar energy, while setting the stage for compromise on emissions targets at the conference here.