BONN: With a 2015 deadline looming large for a global pact on curbing climate change, six days of UN talks closed here yesterday with delegates and observers deflated over a lack of progress.
Rifts over responsibilities for galloping emissions of Earth-warming fossil fuels remain deeply entrenched, they said, preventing detailed negotiations on a new agreement.
The meeting of senior officials in the former West German capital was meant to lay the groundwork for December’s round of ministerial-level UN talks in Lima, where a draft of the deal must be outlined for adoption in Paris a year later.
It was also intended to start identifying what information countries will be required to submit when they lodge their pledges for curbing emissions.
A long list of speakers complained at yesterday’s closing session of an opportunity lost. Ecuador’s negotiator Walter Schuldt, on behalf of a group of 30-odd Like-Minded Developing Countries that include major polluters India and China, said they were “thoroughly dissatisfied” with the outcome.
“We lost valuable negotiating time this week with open-ended discussions,” he said — a sentiment echoed by African and Arab countries, among others that had hoped for more detailed bartering.
Countries remain divided on such fundamentals as the legal form that the 2015 agreement will take, whether there will be different levels of obligation for rich and poor nations, and how to assess whether national carbon curbing pledges are enough, combined, to avoid the worst climate change scenarios.
Many said the Bonn meeting merely restated well-known country positions on how responsibility for climate action must be shared, instead of discussing details like funding to help poor countries shift to less polluting fuels and adapt to change that can no longer be avoided.
AFP
