Sat, Dec 11, 2010 page6

• Final day of climate talks still finds knots

  CANCUN CONUNDRUM: Even programs that were touted as easy potential deals have run into last-minute hurdles over funding or safeguarding indigenous rights

  • AP, CANCUN, MEXICO
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  Climate talks went into their final day yesterday with a raft of issues undergoing intense bargaining through the night, but with high hopes an agreement was within reach on measures to fight global warming.

  In a late-night session, negotiating groups reported they had settled some disputed wording and clauses, but other knotty issues remained to be sorted out. One issue, related to pledges by industrial and developing countries to rein in emissions of heat-trapping gases, appeared deadlocked.

  “We really do not have more time,” said the conference chair, Mexican Foreign Secretary Patricia Espinosa, demanding that negotiators keep at it throughout the night to meet the deadline of yesterday evening.

  

  A Sierra Club activist dressed as a polar bear demonstrates on Thursday outside a session of the UN climate talks at the Moon Palace in Cancun, Mexico.

  PHOTO: REUTERS

  The limited agenda of secondary issues the UN conference had set for itself was proving tougher than expected. It was clear in the final hours of the 193-nation congress that delegates were looking for creative language to finesse irreconcilable views and buy another year until the next major conclave in Durban, South Africa.

  Norwegian Environment Minister Erik Solheim, a veteran of many diplomatic battles, urged negotiators to embrace flexibility.

  “If you want to pick fights in this audience it’s very easy to do it. What we need is a spirit of compromise,” he said to a round of applause.

  Delegations were seeking decisions on governing a US$100 billion annual fund for developing countries threatened by global warming, giving them patented green technology and compensation for halting the destruction of their forests for timber or for clearing agricultural land.

  Even the forestry program, which had been touted as one of the easiest potential deals at Cancun, met last-minute hurdles over how to make sure that the rights of indigenous communities are safeguarded.

  Off the agenda was any proposal for industrial countries to ramp up the modest pledges they made since the last annual meeting in Copenhagen for reducing greenhouse gas emissions that are causing a measurable rise in the Earth’s average temperature.

  Achim Steiner, head of the UN Environment Program, said the issues in Cancun were substantive and not to be underplayed. Even if the conference program is adopted, nothing new would have been done to reduce emissions, he said.

  A key issue of contention in Cancun was whether to make the post-Copenhagen national emissions pledges legally binding, and in what kind of document.

  The answer to those questions would determine the fate of the Kyoto Protocol, which set reductions targets for 37 wealthy countries and which expires in 2012.

  Bolivian President Evo Morales, in a fiery 20-minute speech to the 15,000 delegates, activists and journalists attending the conclave, warned against letting the pact die.

  “If, from here, we send the Kyoto Protocol to the rubbish bin we are responsible for ecocide and genocide, because we will be sending many people to their deaths,” he said.

  Japan reiterated its opposition to extending the protocol with new targets unless all the major emitting countries, including the US, China and other economic powerhouses, accept comparable binding targets.
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