DURBAN, South Africa, Dec 10 (AFP) - UN climate talks today faced the scythe of Father Time as environment ministers haggled over proposals for a new pact to roll back the threat from greenhouse gases.
The 194-nation parley under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) hurtled into an unscheduled 13th day after desperate all-night wrangling over text.
“The concern now is that time is extremely short,” said EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard, spearheading the drive for a legally binding accord by 2015 covering the world's major carbon polluters.
“We still have a lot of text that is not there. It is very difficult to discuss one piece without the other, because in the end the things are interconnected,” she told journalists.
For Mohamed Aslam, environment minister for the climate-threatened island state of the Maldives, “the biggest problem now actually is that we don't have time.” “If we can't reach a decision before the ministers leave, and we are still left with unresolved major issues, it will be difficult,” he told AFP.
Polarised positions, occasional flares of resentment and glacial progress in a complex two-track negotiating process revived memories of the Copenhagen Summit just two years earlier.
Intended to set the seal on a historic treaty, the summit nearly collapsed in finger-pointing. Face was saved in the final hours by a lowest-common-denominator deal put together in the back rooms. Some European delegates feared the Durban talks were in such a mess that conference chair South Africa might have to declare a suspension at the end of the day. A follow-up meeting would then be staged next year to try to reach consensus.
An informal coalition of nearly 90 African countries, least developed nations and small island states, along with emerging giants Brazil and South Africa, have rallied behind Europe's plan for a “roadmap.”
Under this, the European Union would keep the Kyoto Protocol alive after the landmark treaty -- whose carbon constraints apply only to rich economies that have ratified it -- hits a deadline at the end of 2012.
In exchange, the UNFCCC nations would mandate talks for a new pact, due to be concluded in 2015, that would draw all major emitters into a single, legally binding framework.
“Only a very few countries stand in the way of an agreement here,” German Environment Minister Norbert Roettgen told reporters today. “These are the main emitters, as has been the case throughout the week -- the US, China, India.” |
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