Danish police battled demonstrators outside the UN climate summit yesterday as ministers from around the world wrestled over a deal to stave off catastrophic global warming.
Police with dogs fired teargas and arrested about 230 marchers near the Bella Center, while inside the conference venue fears swelled that procedural battles and textual nit-picking could wreck the much-trumpeted outcome.
Around 1,500 demonstrators tried to march on the closely guarded complex, where 194 nations have been called to forge a strategy for tackling the greatest known threat to mankind in the 21st century.
Some of the world’s leaders, arriving ahead of tomorrow’s climax, when some 120 chiefs will be in attendance, began to portray the negotiations in a somber light.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown acknowledged a deal would be “very difficult,” while his Australian counterpart Kevin Rudd said there was “no guarantee” of accord.
If all goes well, tomorrow’s summit will conclude with a post-2012 strategy for shrinking climate change from mortal peril to a manageable threat.
It would set down the outlines of an accord on curbing carbon emissions that cause global warming and craft a mechanism to provide billions of dollars for poorer countries in the firing line of climate change.
But nine days of talks among lower-level officials and informal negotiations among groups of ministers have failed to produce a breakthrough on any of the key — and tightly intertwined — issues.
Tiny Tuvalu, a Pacific archipelago of nine coral atolls which is one of the countries most at risk from rising sea levels, likened the state of negotiations to the Titanic.
“I have the feeling of dread that we are on the Titanic and sinking fast,” its chief negotiator Ian Fry told the conference.
“It’s time ... to launch the lifeboats, it’s time to save this process,” he said.
A UN expert on the right to food said yesterday that climate change represented a “ticking timebomb” that would hit the poorest countries and those who struggled to feed themselves the hardest.
“Climate change is a ticking time bomb for global food security,” UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food Olivier De Schutter said.
“We know that the impacts of climate change will be felt disproportionately by some of the poorest countries and the most vulnerable within those countries,” he added in a statement.
“And we know that small-scale farmers and indigenous peoples, as well as those who depend on land for their livelihoods, will suffer most.”
However, De Schutter cautioned that some measures aimed at countering climate change could also be harmful, after finding that some projects for the Clean Development Mechanism had violated human rights.
The UN expert said local populations were sometimes displaced to clear land for tree-planting projects intended to offset emissions from power plants in Western countries, while investments in crop-based biofuels have had the same impact in some instances, the UN expert said.
“This is not a theoretical debate. There are real cases of violations of the right to food linked to climate policies,” De Schutter said.
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