by Agence France-Presse
COPENHAGEN—Talks will take place in April under the U.N. flag for planning the next steps in the effort toward a global treaty on climate change, Danish Minister for Climate and Energy Lykke Friis said Monday.
The April 9-11 meeting will take place in Bonn, Germany, gathering senior officials of signatories of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), said Friis, whose country currently chairs the negotiating process.
The date was set at a meeting of the UNFCCC bureau, tasked with drawing up a calendar of meetings for 2010 in the aftermath of the controversial climate summit in Copenhagen in December, the Danish news agency Ritzau said.
Negotiators will be asked to sketch out a work program for the end of the year, it said.
The December meeting in Copenhagen yielded a last-minute compromise deal brokered by around two dozen countries, but it failed to get official backing from the entire forum.
The so-called Copenhagen Accord sets a goal of limiting warming to 2 degrees C and pledges nearly $30 billion in aid to poor countries in total by 2012. But it does not spell out the means for achieving the 2 c objective, and the emissions pledges made under it are only voluntary.
Green groups and scientists say the document falls far short of what is necessary for tackling the problem posed by greenhouse gases.
The document did not gain approval at a UNFCCC plenary session and so far has not been officially endorsed by major developing emitters that helped craft it.
As a result, there is confusion as to how the accord fits into the highly complex two-track, 194-nation process toward a climate agreement. Some negotiators privately say the accord has little future other than as a benchmark of political will.
The April meeting adds to the two other scheduled dates in the UNFCCC calendar this year.
One meeting will take at the level of senior officials in Bonn from May 31 to June 11. The next, starting at the official level but ending at the ministerial level, will take place in Mexico from Nov. 29 to Dec. 10.
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