Climate talks face time crunch as Kyoto deadline looms
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Delegates from 183 countries got down to business at a United Nations preparatory climate change conference in Bonn Tuesday.
For the next 11 days they will work towards a draft agreement on limiting greenhouse gas emissions that can serve as the basis of negotiations at the annual UN Climate Summit set to start November 28 in Durban, South Africa.
In Bonn, delegates are working on two tracks - Annex I Parties, the industrialized countries, who are legally bound to reduce emissions under the Kyoto Protocol - and other countries who form the Ad Hoc Working Group onLong-term Cooperative Action (AWG-LCA) under the Framework Convention on Climate Change.
But on Monday, meetings were postponed again and again as, behind closed doors, negotiators tried to agree on agendas.
Time is running out. The first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol expires at the end of 2012 and no agreement is in place to take up where it leaves off.
The Kyoto Protocol is strongly supported by many developing countries who maintain that they did not create the climate change problem but are being forced to bear its consequences. They favor continuing legally binding emissions limits on the Annex I countries.
Jorge Arguello, Ambassador to the UN, Argentina, and Chair of the G-77/China Group, told delegates in Bonn of the group's concern with the slow progress towards a second commitment period, emphasizing the need to reduce the gap between pledges and what is required by science and historical responsibility.
As new data showing another rise in atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions emerged, the UN's top climate change official called on governments to make progress in the fight against global warming, building on the commitments they made last year at Cancun, Mexico.
"Governments lit a beacon in Cancun towards a low-emission world which is resilient to climate change. They committed themselves to a maximum global average temperature rise of two degrees Celsius, with further consideration of a 1.5-degree maximum," said Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC.
