Last decade was the warmest ever, says NASA<\/a><\/p>\n The Climate Post: Asian ice granted temporary stay of execution<\/a><\/p>\n New Sierra Club chief brings confrontational style to the job<\/a><\/p>\n
\t\t\t\tby Agence France-Presse <\/p>\n
PARIS—World talks on climate change may not yield a legally binding pact by year’s end, U.N. climate pointman Yvo de Boer said on Wednesday, in his first public assessment after last month’s turbulent Copenhagen summit.<\/p>\n
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De Boer, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), said he had taken stock among a number of countries after the Copenhagen meeting. The mood among them was to forge an agreement this December on how to tackle climate change and then discuss further how to “package that outcome” as a treaty, he said in a webcast press conference from Bonn.<\/p>\n
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Last month’s marathon talks yielded the “Copenhagen Accord,” a non-binding document crafted by a small group of countries that account for around 80 percent of global carbon emissions. The accord was written by a couple of dozen leaders on the final day of the talks as the two-week meeting, hamstrung by textual wrangles and finger-pointing, faced collapse.<\/p>\n
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The failure to achieve a binding treaty disappointed those who had expected Copenhagen to crown an arduous two-year process with a treaty to roll back the threat posed by greenhouse gases and provide funds to poor and vulnerable countries.<\/p>\n
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Mauled by the experience, the U.N. forum is due to resume in the coming months, culminating this year with a ministerial-level meeting in Mexico in December.<\/p>\n
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“My sense, having spoken to about 15 or 20 countries so far, is that generally people want to reach a conclusion on the [twin negotiating texts] in Mexico and then they will be in a position to decide on how they want to package that outcome in legal terms,” De Boer said.<\/p>\n
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He also made clear that the Copenhagen Accord was not a substitute for the UNFCCC’s negotiation template. “It’s a political tool that has broad support at the highest possible level and that we can very usefully deploy to resolve the remaining issues that we have in the negotiating process,” he said.<\/p>\n
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The Copenhagen Accord set a broad goal of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), but did not specify the staging points for achieving this goal or a year by which greenhouse-gas emissions should peak.<\/p>\n
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Instead, countries are being urged to identify what actions they intend to take, either as binding curbs on emissions or voluntary action. $28 billion in aid has been pledged by rich countries for 2010-2012.<\/p>\n
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De Boer said he had asked countries to spell out by Jan. 31 whether they intended to be “associated” with the Copenhagen Accord or what sort of measures they envisaged. This was not a coercive deadline, he said, but simply intended to help him write a report on the outcome of Copenhagen.<\/p>\n
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“You can describe it as a soft deadline, there’s nothing deadly about it,” he said. “If you fail to meet it, then you can still associate with the accord afterwards. In that sense, countries are not being asked to sign the accord, they are not being asked to take on a legally binding target, they will not be bound to the action which they submit to the [UNFCCC] secretariat. It will be an indication of their intent and … [an] important tool to advance the negotiations.”<\/p>\n
Related Links:<\/strong><\/p>\n Last decade was the warmest ever, says NASA<\/a><\/p>\n The Climate Post: Asian ice granted temporary stay of execution<\/a><\/p>\n New Sierra Club chief brings confrontational style to the job<\/a><\/p>\n
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