Environmentalists: UN Talks Too Slow, "We're Losing Time"
BONN, Germany — U.N. climate delegates completed their first rough sketch of a new global warming agreement Friday, a draft replete with gaps and competing ideas that await decisions by political leaders.
At the end of a two-week negotiating session, the rift lay more clearly exposed between industrial and emerging nations _ and within those blocs _ on the obligations of the 192 countries involved in the talks to control greenhouse gases blamed for climate change.
The end result, due in six months, will determine the course of development for generations in the economies of rich and poor countries, as well as the planet's health.
Though conceptual issues remained unbridged, officials and environmental activists agreed the negotiations progressed toward drafting the framework for the accord that is due to be completed in December at a major conference in Denmark.
World leaders will meet several times later this year, beginning with a Group of Eight summit in July, with climate change on the agenda.
Yvo de Boer, the top U.N. climate change official, said he was confident of reaching an ambitious agreement in Copenhagen, though it will lack details that will require further work.
The latest round showed that governments "are committed to reaching an agreement, and this is a big achievement," he told reporters.
The draft, which began with 53 pages when this session began June 1, ballooned by Friday to about 200 pages as delegations inserted language to be negotiated later. The second draft was expected to be whittled down to a more manageable size at the next round of talks in August.
Environmental activists said they were concerned at incremental pace of talks.
"We see no political breakthrough. Instead, delegates are just preparing themselves for battles to be fought at later meetings," said Kim Carstensen of the World Wildlife Fund for Nature. It was helpful to clarify their positions, he said, but "we're losing time."
Scientists say industrialized nations must cut emissions by 25 to 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020 to prevent climate disasters, such as coastal flooding from rising sea levels, severe weather events, and variations in rainfall and temperatures that will affect agriculture and wipe out species of plants and animals.
Pledges from advanced countries fall far short of that range. WWF calculated that the declarations from wealthy countries amounted to a total emissions cut of just 10 percent.
"There is no question that industrialized countries must raise their sights higher," De Boer said.
The talks aim to craft a deal in Copenhagen to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which required 37 industrial countries to cut emissions a total 5 percent from 1990 by 2012. It made no demands on developing countries, and the U.S. refused to sign on to that deal.
Now, the U.S. and the European Union say swiftly developing countries like China, India and Brazil must accept some commitments, although they would be of a different nature and legal force than the commitments of the industrial world.
Jonathan Pershing, the chief U.S. delegate, said that unlike the industrial countries China should not have national caps on its emissions.
Beijing should have binding actions, but not binding outcomes, said Pershing, who broke away from the Bonn talks earlier this week to join a U.S. delegation to Beijing.
"Our expectation of China is that they will take domestic actions that can be measured, quantified and reported," he said. "They will be bound to those actions both domestically and in the international arena. That is not the same thing as saying that those actions have to have an outcome that is binding."
On Thursday, India's chief delegate Shyam Saran said his country rejects any limitations on its development, but is willing to allow outside scrutiny of programs built from international funding and the transfer of technology.
With one-third of its 1.2 billion people lacking electricity, India needed to continue growing, and its historical emissions could not compare to the carbon pumped into the atmosphere over the past 150 years by the industrial West.
Saran rejected any idea of scrapping the Kyoto Protocol, which classifies countries as those with emissions targets and those with no obligations at all.
But that structure was unlikely to remain unchanged in Copenhagen to account for emerging economies that would also include South Korea, Brazil and South Africa.
"The world is a lot different now," said Andrew M. Deutz, of The Nature Conservancy, an advocacy group. "To make decisions you need to have the developing countries at the table, and they are going to have to participate" in the solution, he said.
Loading comments…
ARTHUR MAX | June 12, 2009 12:17 PM EST |