by Agence France-Presse
WASHINGTON—The world’s 17 major economies accounting for the bulk of carbon emissions will meet this month in Washington in hopes of pushing forward slow-moving climate talks, a U.S. official said Thursday.
Officials from the so-called Major Economies Forum—which accounts for more than 80 percent of the emissions blamed for global warming—will meet on April 18 and 19 in Washington, the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
The meeting marks part of a renewed push to seek progress after the rancorous U.N.-led climate summit in Copenhagen in December, which ended with a vague agreement that left few happy. A small number of developing nations including Sudan, Cuba, and Venezuela vociferously criticized Western nations at the Copenhagen conference, preventing formal approval of the fine-tuned agreement.
Negotiators under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will gather in Bonn from Friday to Sunday in their first official talks since the strife-torn talks in the Danish capital. Germany has also invited some 50 environment ministers to a May 2-4 conference in Bonn.
Todd Stern, the top U.S. climate negotiator, said after the Copenhagen meeting that he was leaning toward working out details of the next climate agreement in smaller settings while not bypassing the U.N. process.
Negotiators hope to seal the next global agreement on climate change at a summit this December in Mexico. The treaty would succeed the Kyoto Protocol, whose obligations on cutting emissions expire at the end of 2012.
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