Time for tackling climate change running out

Climate envoys met on Monday in Bangkok with a new sense of urgency, saying

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negotiators are racing against a December deadline to devise a global deal.

“Time is not just pressing, it has almost run out,” said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

“But in two weeks, real progress can be made toward the goals that world leaders have set for the negotiations, to break deadlocks, and to cooperate toward concrete progress,” Boer said.

Nations across the globe are at odds over the level of emissions cuts developed countries must take, potentially binding commitments that the developing world could undertake, and the level of aid from wealthier to poorer nations to help them adapt to global warming and develop clean-energy sources.

Delegates in Bangkok will try to shorten a negotiating text that’s almost 200 pages long, one de Boer described last month as “afloat in a sea of brackets” with each pair representing an area of disagreement.

“We have a text before us that is excessive and unmanageable,” Anders Turesson, Sweden’s chief climate negotiator, who was speaking on behalf of the 27-nation European Union, told reporters. “We need to use the time here in Bangkok to considerably condense this text.”

After the Bangkok talks, which last until October 9, countries have another week in Barcelona in November before a December summit in Copenhagen to draw up an accord to extend or replace the 1997 Kyoto treaty, the present climate-protection accord.

Jonathan Pershing, the lead negotiator for the US, said the task is “difficult” and that delegates need to “move away from large, framing ideas and into concrete recommendations for action.”

Pershing said he feels ‘positive’ about China, the biggest emitter, and its pledge to set a domestic target to cut emissions relative to economic output. He welcomed moves by Brazil to lower deforestation and by India to boost solar power.

“We expect them to stand behind those actions the way we stand behind ours and reflect them in this international agreement,” Pershing said. “We’re looking at a process in which we can take national commitments and have those enforced and at the international level.”

India and China have balked at translating national policies into internationally binding commitments, saying it’s up to developed nations, the biggest historical polluters, to lead the way. Emissions-reduction pledges by wealthy nations at present fall short of the 25 per cent to 40 per cent cut needed from 1990 levels by 2020, de Boer said.