Karl Malakunas Yahoo News 8 Apr 11;http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
BANGKOK (AFP) – The first UN climate talks for the year entered their final phase on Friday with negotiators still trying to hammer out a deal after familiar feuds between rich and poor nations flared.
The four days of talks had an apparently modest main goal of sorting out an agenda for the rest of the year's negotiations that would lay the foundations for agreements at an annual UN climate summit in South Africa in November.
But delegates said the agenda had still not been decided by early Friday, with one key point of dispute an insistence by many poorer countries for a greater focus on actions developed countries must take to fight global warming.
"Everybody is a bit surprised, we did not expect the agenda to stall the talks for this long," France's ambassador for climate change negotiations, Serge Lepeltier, told AFP.
Delegates said a compromise could still be reached by the end of the talks on Friday evening that would set a path towards the end-of-year summit in Durban.
But they said the spirit of cooperation between developed and developing countries that led to breakthroughs at the last annual summit in the Mexican resort city of Cancun in December was not nearly as strong in Bangkok.
"This year will be more difficult and Durban will be more difficult than Cancun," Lepeltier said.
"The power struggle is back."
The talks began on Tuesday with poor nations demanding that rich ones agree to a second round of legally binding greenhouse gas emission reduction commitments under an updated Kyoto Protocol.
The first round of commitments are due to expire at the end of 2012, but some richer countries have said they do not want to sign up to a second phase because major polluters the United States and China will not.
The United States never ratified the Kyoto Protocol and its climate envoys have repeated this week that the country has no intention of signing on.
Developing countries, including China, did not have to commit to cutting emissions as part of the Kyoto Protocol and most of them maintain this should remain the case.
Throughout the Bangkok talks, some of the richer countries have pushed to have the focus for this year's negotiations primarily on pushing forward the more modest agreements achieved in Cancun last year.
However poorer nations say that, if only the Cancun agreements are put into action by the end of 2012, rich nations will not have to agree on legally binding emission cuts and the Kyoto Protocol will have largely fizzled out.
The Cancun agreements saw all nations pledge "urgent action" to keep temperatures from rising no more than two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.
A Green Climate Fund was also established that aims to by 2020 channel $100 billion annually from rich countries to poor ones to help them cope with climate change.
But many of the hardest issues were put aside in Cancun because nations were seeking to rebuild trust and revive UN climate negotiations, following a near collapse in the process 12 months earlier at a summit in Copenhagen.
Those issues, most particularly whether developed countries will agree to a second phase of emission cuts under the Kyoto Protocol, threaten to weigh down negotiations throughout 2011.
UN climate chief Christiana Figueres has also warned that the non-binding pledges made by nations in Cancun to curb their emissions will not be nearly enough to keep temperature rises under the crucial two-degree threshold.
U.N. Climate Talks Risk Backsliding on Cancun Outcome
David Fogarty PlanetArk 8 Apr 11;
Arguments over the agenda that have stalled U.N. climate talks in Bangkok this week show that some nations are trying to row back from hard-won agreements reached last December, Russia said on Wednesday.
The December deal in Cancun included a Green Climate Fund to manage $100 billion a year in aid to poor nations by 2020 and to limit a rise in average world temperatures to less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial times.
It also won consensus on measures to protect tropical forests and a framework to help poorer nations adapt to rising seas and greater weather extremes, in a series of agreements viewed as saving the fraught U.N. climate negotiations from collapse.
But the April 3-8 talks in Bangkok, the first major climate meeting since Cancun and meant to agree on a plan to build on the December agreements, have stalled because of a dispute over an agenda presented by the 131-member G77 grouping plus China.
Rich nations say that agenda doesn't reflect all the agreements in Cancun and pushes for the resolution of key outstanding issues by the end of the year instead of trying to work through things step-by-step as agreed in Cancun.
"The hopes and the expectations were that after Cancun we will start more focused work on building up on the outcome of Cancun," said Oleg Shamanov, head of the Russian delegation.
He said the idea was to come up with the specific elements of what would become the formal decisions at major climate talks in the South African city of Durban at year's end.
"Instead we are now trapped and locked into purely procedural discussions about the agenda that could have been avoided.
"That highly disappoints me that we are pulling back from the dynamics that we achieved in Cancun," he told Reuters in an interview.
FIREWALL
Cancun left unresolved tougher issues such as the fate of the Kyoto Protocol, the U.N.'s main weapon in the fight against climate change. Poor nations want Kyoto's fate resolved by Durban.
Kyoto's 2008-12 first phase binds nearly 40 rich nations to emissions targets. But no successor pact that would expand or replace Kyoto from 2013 is in sight and rich and poor nations are deeply divided on the shape of any new pact.
Poorer nations want Kyoto to remain as the main agreement. Under the pact, developing nations are obliged to take voluntary steps to curb emissions.
"My assessment is that some parties that are a bit scared of the outcomes of Cancun, that they are too far reaching and that they are trying to take a precautionary position," said Shamanov, adding that Russia was keen to see progress in the talks.
"I would like to see the work focused on specific elements where we have more or less clear mandates emanating from Cancun. We have to go step by step."He said poorer nations needed to understand it was impossible to renegotiate or revise the Cancun Agreements "through the backdoor of procedural disputes on the agenda."
"I think that is what it is about. It's all about a firewall between the actions of developed countries, commitments of the developed countries and the possible actions by developing countries."
(Editing by Jeremy Laurence)
