Take the microphones away, close the doors, and negotiators tend to be a lot more reasonable.
That became apparent to Mexico last month when it organized a forum to prepare for the UN climate conference this weekend in Bonn — the first since the rancorous and disappointing Copenhagen summit in December last year in which delegates reached only a threadbare agreement.
The Mexicans, who will host the next major climate conference at the end of the year in the coastal town of Cancun, plan to hold more, smaller meetings, to move issues along more swiftly than is possible at unwieldy conferences involving thousands of delegates.
“It’s not feasible to draft an agreement in the context of 190 hands [countries] just tampering with the text,” Fernando Tudela, Mexico’s chief negotiator, said on Saturday.
“We intend to keep setting up informal meetings, but connected somehow to the formal process,” he said in an interview.
Only 33 countries attended the first meeting. More were invited, but several hard-line states declined to come, an Asian ambassador who was in Mexico City said.
Unlike the public meetings, rhetoric was kept to a minimum as the negotiators discussed ways to advance the talks this year, while trying to avoid the deadlock that characterized last year, said the official, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of backstage deliberations.
Future informal sessions will involve different countries, depending on the question under discussion, Tudela said. They would be chosen to represent the range of opinions of the 194 countries involved in the UN negotiations.
“I perceive much more flexibility now,” Tudela said. “I sincerely hope that the acrimony we found in Copenhagen has been left behind.”
That flexibility was little in evidence when the Bonn conference opened with a public session on Friday. Delegations clashed over how to pursue a global warming agreement this year, and whether the hastily drafted Copenhagen Accord should be central to the talks, just one factor that feeds into those talks, or be disregarded altogether.
Negotiators are trying to craft a treaty to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which set pollution reduction targets for industrial countries. The protocol’s main provisions expire in 2012. Unlike Kyoto, the next agreement will also put constraints on developing countries such as China, which has already surpassed the US as the world largest emitter of greenhouse gases blamed for rising temperatures.
The Copenhagen Accord, brokered by US President Barack Obama in the final 36 hours of the summit, called on industrial and developing countries to register their plans to control greenhouse gases and set up provisions to raise nearly US$30 billion over the next three years to help poor countries combat the effects of climate change, ramping up to US$100 billion a year by 2020.
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