Governments certain to seal Paris climate deal: U.N. climate chief

Susanna Twidale PlanetArk 27 May 15;

Governments are certain to sign a global climate deal in Paris in six months' time even though most countries have yet to outline how they plan to cut emissions, the United Nations' climate chief said on Tuesday.

Almost 200 governments are due to meet at a conference in Paris from Nov. 30 to Dec. 11 to agree on a deal to slow global warming.

"Governments are actually very well on track...there is no doubt that this agreement will be forged in Paris," Christiana Figueres, head of the U.N. climate change secretariat, said in an interview at a carbon market event in Barcelona.

Figureres' comments come just a week after French President Francois Hollande said he was worried about a lack of progress towards a climate deal in the French capital.

So far, just 37 of 196 U.N. member states have submitted plans to the United Nations, outlining their actions to slow global warming beyond 2020.

The plans, known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) in U.N. jargon, are meant to be the building blocks for a deal in Paris.

"We expect many more critical ones to come in over the next few weeks and months and then we expect another large crop of INDCs to be coming in the third quarter (ahead of Paris)," Figureres said.

A draft negotiating text to work towards the Paris deal was agreed in February but Figueres said negotiators would, at the U.N. climate meeting starting next week in Bonn, trim down the 86-page document to a more manageable size.

"We will first look through the duplications and how can the ideas and the solutions in the text be crystallized expect a much more manageable product to emerge at the end of June," she said.

The United Nations was confident of a deal up to the last moment in 2009, when a summit in Copenhagen collapsed because of objections from a handful of countries that rich nations were failing to promise deep cuts in emissions.

(Editing by Nina Chestney and Susan Thomas)