Full climate deal 'unlikely' in Copenhagen

Yahoo News 10 Jun 09;

BONN, Germany (AFP) – The UN's top climate official on Wednesday voiced doubt about the prospects for completing a new pact on global warming in Copenhagen by its much-touted December deadline.

"I don't think it is possible between now and the end of Copenhagen to finalise every last detail of a post-2012 [accord], of a long-term response to climate change," said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

"There is going to be work after Copenhagen," he told a press conference at the latest round of UN climate talks here.

"What I would like to see come out of Copenhagen is a robust architecture to address climate change that is attractive to as many countries as possible so that we have a solid foundation to build on moving forward from there."

Looking at the state of negotiations, De Boer complained that industrialised countries were still far short of pledging the cuts in heat-trapping greenhouse gases by 2020 demanded by scientists.

And he said he saw no potential for agreement at Copenhagen over global emissions cuts for mid-century.

The marathon negotiation was initiated in Bali, Indonesia in December 2007.

That is when the world's nations set down a two-year "road map" for a deal that would address climate change beyond 2012, when the UNFCCC's Kyoto Protocol provisions expire.

But the talks are mired in disagreement over burden-sharing, pitching rich countries against poor but also dividing rich countries themselves.

A 30-page draft negotiating text has exploded to more than 200 pages, which will have to be whittled down in future sessions to try to make haggling workable.

De Boer described an agreement at Copenhagen that would "deliver clarity on the political issues."

The four issues he named were targets for emissions cuts by industrialised countries; efforts by developing giants to limit the growth of their own emissions; funding to help poor countries cope with climate change and tackle their own emissions; and the "governance structure" of the future treaty.

"I think if Copenhagen can give clarity on those four points, what happens afterwards is fixing the details rather than a repetition of fundamental debates," he said.

Among the hot issues at the climate talks are commitments on reducing emissions by 2020, the first deadline in a process by which greenhouse gas emissions would be ratcheted down further by mid-century.

"We are still a long, long way from the ambitious emissions reduction scenarios of the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on climate Change] that are a kind of a beacon in terms of what industrialised countries need to do if we are to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change," he said.

He referred to a landmark report in 2007 in which the IPCC put forward a basket of scenarios for tackling climate change, one of which eyed emissions cuts of 25-40 percent by industrialised countries by 2020 over 1990.

He added that despite his "huge belief" in the talks, "I don't think in Copenhagen we're going to get an agreement on an 80-percent global emission reduction [by 2050] and I think that, at the end of day, is what we need."