Patrick Rucker PlanetArk 25 Mar 11;
Delegates from 40 nations tasked with designing a "green fund" to help poor countries cope with climate change will hold their first meeting in late April, U.N. officials said on Thursday.
The meeting to start developing the Green Climate Fund, which had been postponed over disagreements about who should attend, will be held in Mexico City on April 28-29.
Climate talks in December committed rich countries to finance $100 billion a year in climate aid for poor countries from 2020.
That was one of the modest goals achieved during that last major climate summit, which failed to end in a binding deal to limit greenhouses gasses like tailpipe exhaust and industrial smog.
Since that event, held in the Mexican resort city of Cancun, delegates from the 40 nations that will help govern the fund had not been able fix a meeting date.
The fund was part of a package that included steps to protect tropical forests and share clean technologies.
Rising aid is meant to help developing nations curb their greenhouse gas emissions by shifting from fossil fuels to renewable energies and to help them adapt to effects of heat waves, droughts, floods, storms and rising sea levels.
(Editing by Vicki Allen)
UN climate chief says time for work on Cancun deal
Yahoo News 24 Mar 11;
MEXICO CITY (AFP) – The UN's climate chief on Thursday urged countries to flesh out last December's worldwide deal in Cancun, including details of a fund to help poor countries badly exposed to the impacts of global warming.
Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), said a meeting in Bangkok from April 3-8 had to pave the way to "the next big climate step" in Durban, South Africa, at year's end.
"The world was at a crossroads in Cancun and took a step forward towards a climate-safe world," Figueres said in a press statement, released at a meeting in Mexico City of more than three dozen countries.
"Now governments must move purposefully down the path they have set."
The Bangkok meeting had to set up a "clear work plan" for 2011 to follow up Cancun, she said.
"This includes work on making the institutions for climate funding, technology cooperation and adaptation fully functional within the deadlines agreed in Cancun," said Figueres.
The so-called Green Climate Fund established in Cancun will potentially channel hundreds of billions of dollars in aid for poor climate-vulnerable countries.
But its key architecture -- notably where the funds should be spent and how they should be accounted for -- has still to be drawn up. A transitional committee that will propose the design is to hold a maiden meeting in Mexico City on Monday and Tuesday, Figueres said.
Two other institutions agreed in Cancun are a "technology mechanism" for promoting clean technologies and an "adaptation framework" to boost international cooperation for poor countries in the fight against worsening drought, flood and rising seas.
Ministers or senior officials from around 40 countries attended the meeting in Mexico City, billed as a "stakeholders' dialogue" to assess the state of play since Cancun, a UNFCCC official said.
After Bangkok, the forum meets in Bonn from June 6-17 at senior level and in Durban, South Africa, from November 28-December 9, ending at ministerial level.
The talks in Cancun last November 28-December 11 also yielded a rallying call to cap warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) but split badly over the future of the UNFCCC's Kyoto Protocol, whose first round of emissions-cutting pledges expires at the end of next year.
