admin“The workplan was not an easy issue to agree on,” UN climate chief Christiana Figueres told reporters after the negotiations held at Bonn in Germany.
“All parties needed reassurances from each other to allow them to undertake the work with a certain sense of comfort.”
UN climate talks in South Africa last year agreed a package of measures that would extend the 1997 Kyoto Protocol after it expires at the end of this year and decide a new, legally binding accord to cut global greenhouse gas emissions by 2015, coming into force by 2020.
In the Bonn talks, the first negotiation session since that deal was struck, delegates have argued for over a week on how to organise work on a new climate deal and appoint a chair to steer the process.
Procedural wrangling during the two-week session, attended by national negotiating teams below ministerial level, has shown there is mistrust among participants and heaps pressure on ministerial talks in Doha, Qatar, at the end of the year to deliver, observers said.
“When people start fighting about agendas it is a symptom of lack of trust and of some pretty substantive areas of disagreement,” said Celine Charveriat, director of advocacy and campaigns at international development charity Oxfam.
The European Union and others have accused China, along with other developing countries, of “procedural blocking” or trying to backtrack on the Durban deal by altering the approach to negotiations.
One initiative, an attempt to bring discussion on emissions cuts by both rich and poor countries into one forum, rather than keep it in two separate negotiating tracks, is no longer an obstacle to progress but others may emerge.
“We cleared a difficult hurdle here. There is no doubt that it will be the first of many, and we must remember that time is not on our side,” said Sai Navoti, lead negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States, which represents small nations most vulnerable to global warming.
On the other side, developing countries accuse the United States, the EU and other rich nations of trying to avoid making deeper emissions cuts and dodging increases in finance to help poorer nations deal with climate change. — Reuters.
Online Reporter