Instead, the weighty task of officially sealing four years of global negotiations falls to the somewhat subjective judgement of French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who will call time on talks as soon as he believes 195 nations have finally reached a “consensus” on how to stop the world from warming.
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PARIS, Dec 10 (Reuters) – It would have been unthinkable just a few months ago, but a new global deal to combat climate change appears poised to set the world a much more ambitious target than expected, even if achieving that goal is far out of reach for now. Gurdial Singh Nijar, representing Malaysia and speaking in the name of about 20 developing countries, said the draft was undermining the “common but differentiated responsibility principle” agreed to in 1992 as part of the U.N. Framework Convention.
“If we add the effect of climate change… you really have the elements of a ideal storm”, he said on the sidelines of the Paris climate talks “We are here…to find out how to weather that storm”.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry says Paris climate talks are “getting down to the critical stage”, as he meets negotiators from developing countries at the high-stakes conference.
“We’re working on it”, Kerry said as he emerged from one meeting room with an entourage of security agents and State Department aides.
“We can not just switch overnight… and go to renewables”, he said.
But the United States and other rich nations say emerging giants must also do more, arguing that developing countries now account for most of today’s emissions and thus will be largely responsible for future warming. The current draft of the text includes language directing countries to provide an update of their progress every five years or so, which would be compiled into a global “stock-take”, a kind of collated update, sometime after 2020. Emissions neutrality wasn’t defined in the text.
Some campaigners warn that the review cycle needs to start earlier, with countries only “invited” to submit new, more ambitious emissions reduction plans before the deal comes into force in 2020.
Negotiators in that bloc have realized, the official said, that “if they move the long-term goal further out, it will move politics in the short term closer to where they need to be”. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly about the negotiations. “I know that we all worked extremely hard”.
The latest draft offers a compromise that states the objective of the agreement is to hold temperatures to well below 2C, but to aim for 1.5C.
The draft still contained competing options on the key issue of transparency – making sure countries follow through on their emissions targets.
Indeed, rich countries have to step up if the talks are to be successful, said Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
Susann Scherbarth, a climate justice and energy campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe said: “The deal is going in a dirty direction”.
More than 180 countries presented plans to cut or curb their emissions before the conference, and negotiators are discussing ways to anchor those pledges in the agreement. Western countries want advanced developing economies such as China and oil-rich Arab countries to pitch in.
The draft didn’t resolve how to deal with demands from vulnerable countries to deal with unavoidable damage from rising seas and other climate impacts.
But the key issues of finance for poor countries to deal with climate change, the differences in responsibility and actions of developed and developing countries, and the overall level of ambition in the agreement, are still the focus of political dispute.
The talks have previously been guided by a goal to limit warming to 2 degrees C, compared with preindustrial times.
Many nations most vulnerable to climate change want to limit warming to no more than 1.5°C above pre-Industrial Revolution levels. The LDCs are also pushing for the 1.5 rather than the 2 degree target.
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“With this, I would be able to go home and tell my people that our chance for survival is not lost”, he said.
