Prospects of finalising a new binding agreement on climate change by the end of the year are "slim", according to UN climate convention chief Yvo de Boer.

He was speaking at the first UN climate talks since the Copenhagen summit. A negotiating process was agreed, but big divisions remain between nations.

The EU vowed to step up efforts to achieve a legally binding treaty.

Analyses show pledges in Copenhagen are not likely to keep the global average temperature rise below 2C (3.6F).

"We see that with current pledges, we wouldn't reach that objective - this is why we were here, and this is why we are working to increase ambition," said Spain's delegation chief Alicia Montalvo Santamaria, speaking for the EU.

Grenada's Ambassador Dessima Williams, who chairs the Association of Small Island States (Aosis), said that despite agreement on how negotiations should proceed through the year, there were still hurdles to cross in terms of what a new global deal might look like.

"The question now is whether or not there will be a sense of ethical commitment [from high-emitting countries]," she told BBC News.

"The situation of climate change is not as dramatic as an eathquake, but it is of equal proportion, [and] there's a greater burden of responsibility on the major emitters."

Dangers of symmetry

On the final evening of the three-day meeting, delegates took more than four hours to agree apparently simple matters such as how many times to meet over the year, and how the chair should write a draft negotiating text.

" There's no political will to increase pledges, there's no debate happening, and that's not acceptable - Kathrin Gutmann, WWF "

The protracted wrangles were rooted to a large extent in the debris of Copenhagen, in particular in the mistrust engendered when on the final day, a small group of countries wrote and then agreed the Copenhagen Accord, a political declaration entailing voluntary carbon curbs from major emitting countries.

Here, developed nations such as the US and Australia lobbied for the accord to be incorporated into any new global agreement.

But developing countries decried it as far too weak, and objected to the "undemocratic" nature of the process.

"It has heightened the feeling of distrust within the process," Mr de Boer told BBC News.

About 110 countries have endorsed the accord. But many of them have added the caveat that they see it only as a step towards a global, binding treaty, and that they want the treaty agreed by this year's summit, to be held in the Mexican resort of Cancun in November and December.

The chances of that happening, said Mr de Boer, were "very slim".

"I think that developing countries will want to see what the nature of an agreement is going to be before they will be willing to turn it into a legally- binding treaty, so that basically means a two-step process," he said.

Nevertheless, US delegation chief Jonathan Pershing found much to like in the meeting here.

"If I think about the contrast between this meeting and Copenhagen... this was pretty good," he said.

"I think there's been time for the dust to settle around Copenhagen, for people to look back and think 'it's not perfect, but it advances the ball substantially - let's work with it'.

"I don't think people want this to fail."

Mr de Boer flagged up the US demand for "symmetry" as a potentially major stumbling block.

In order to placate domestic concerns about losing competitiveness, the US is for example demanding that China and other major developing countries should be subject to the same regime on verifying emissions curbs as industrialised nations.

"What the US has also indicated is that it would want to be treated on a par with major developing countries, and that I think is going to be very difficult," said Mr de Boer.

Fast work

Negotiators eventually decided here that there should be three more negotiating meetings between now and the Cancun summit.

"It is a very involved process - it is not a sprint, it is a decathlon," noted India's delegate Vijai Sharma.

Developing countries are looking for clarity within months on "fast-start finance" - the pledge in the Copenhagen Accord under which developed nations, principally the EU, Japan and the US, will release $30bn over three years to developing nations.

The US made it clear that any country not endorsing the Copenhagen Accord would be unlikely to receive US funding.

"In our view, fast-start financing was explicitly an agreement of the Copenhagen Accord, and those countries that are part of the accord should expect to see that finance," said Mr Pershing.

Last week, the US said it had withheld money from Bolivia and Ecuador because they had not endorsed the accord - a development condemned as "arm-twisting" by some activists.

The EU's approach is not completely clear. The European Commission's lead negotiator Artur Runge-Metzger told reporters it "would be hard to think that money would flow to countries not associated with the accord"; but later Ms Montalvo Santamaria said endorsing the accord was "not a conditionality" to receiving the cash.

Before June, the EU aims to produce a report outlining how its share of the first year's fast-start money - 2.4bn euros - was being allocated and spent.

Illegitimacy

The next month sees an intense flurry of non-UN climate meetings.

Next week, the US hosts a meeting of the Major Economies Forum, which brings together 17 of the biggest-emitting countries.

That is followed closely by Bolivia's World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth; then, in early May, Germany hosts a ministerial meeting of a group of selected countries.

Kathrin Gutmann from WWF said leaders had to understand that current pledges were not enough to meet their own targets.

"The important thing is not to legitimise the proposals we have as being enough," she said.

"There's no political will to increase pledges, there's no debate happening, and that's not acceptable." (By Richard Black)

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Source: BBC News

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BONN/LONDON (Reuters) - Delegates from 175-nations agreed on two extra sessions of U.N. climate control talks this year at the end of a tortuous meeting in Bonn that presaged big battles ahead over the non-binding Copenhagen Accord.

The Copenhagen Accord seeks to limit a rise in average world temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) over pre-industrial times but does not spell out how.

Reached at a fractious U.N. climate summit in December, the accord was strongly backed by Washington and bitterly opposed by some developing nations, though it also holds out the prospect of $100 billion climate aid a year from 2020.

"This process has big problems," said Annie Petsonk of the U.S.-based Environmental Defense Fund, at the end of the meeting in Bonn.

The session had been due to end on Sunday, but delegates wrangled deep into the night over a two-page plan to guide negotiations, with several hours spent on the wording of what appeared to be uncontroversial phrases.

The final text skirted one of the biggest problems -- the fate of the Copenhagen Accord. The December summit had disappointed many by failing to come up with a binding treaty.

"We have just about worked out the procedural kinks -- save the big one, which is what to do about the way in which we will respond to the Copenhagen Accord," Dessima Williams of Grenada, chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, told Reuters.

The accord was not mentioned by name in the Bonn workplan.

Margaret Mukahanana-Sangarwe of Zimbabwe, who chaired the U.N. talks and will draw up new draft texts by May 17, said the phrasing had a "constructive ambiguity...to me it seems to cover the work that was done to produce the Copenhagen Accord."

The Accord has backing from almost 120 of 194 member states, including top emitters China, the United States, the European Union, Russia and India.

It faces opposition led by countries such as Bolivia, Cuba, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.

Some developing nations complained that rich countries pledged insufficient action under the Accord to stop disaster for millions of people from floods, droughts, heatwaves and rising seas.

By contrast, Saudi Arabia fears a shift from oil to renewable energies.

Bolivia said that the Bonn meeting had ruled the Accord out of negotiations that will culminate in a ministerial meeting in Mexico in November and December.

"Despite continual attempts by the U.S. to make the completely unacceptable Copenhagen Accord the basis for future negotiations, I am glad to say they failed," said Pablo Solon, Bolivia's chief delegate.

The U.N.'s top climate official, Yvo de Boer, said he did not expect a breakthrough to achieve a new treaty in Mexico.

For a $125 billion carbon market, failure to agree a global legally binding deal would be "regrettable" but tough national policies were more important, said one expert.

"It is cap and trade which is driving this market," said Andrei Marcu, head of regulatory and policy affairs at oil trading firm Mercuria.

Cap and trade schemes control industrial carbon emissions by forcing companies to buy from a fixed quota of emissions permits.

A European scheme is at the center of a carbon market which could grow significantly if the United States passes a climate bill this year.

"I'm looking very much to what the U.S. will do," said Marcu, who was upbeat that the Bonn meeting had re-launched talks which "fell apart" in Copenhagen. (By Alister Doyle and Gerard Wynn; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)

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Source: Reuters

Three days of talks aimed at putting a new gloss on UN climate talks ended late on Sunday after new textual trench warfare less than four months after a stormy summit in Copenhagen.

Countries wrangled for hours beyond the scheduled close over the work schedule under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and what blueprint to adopt for further negotiations.

"The negotiations were very tense. There is a lot of mistrust," said French chief negotiator Paul Watkinson.

"Some delegates don't seem to have taken onboard what happened in Copenhagen and the need to gain quick, concrete results."

As the 194-nation forum struggled with a sour mood, UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer warned that the process would be dealt a crippling blow if it failed to deliver a breakthrough at a November 29-December 10 meeting in Cancun, Mexico.

Cancun had to yield a "functioning architecture" on big questions, including curbs on carbon emissions and aid for poor countries, de Boer said in an interview with AFP.

"We reached an agreement in Bali (in 2007) that we would conclude negotiations two years later in Copenhagen, and we didn't," he said.

"The finishing line has now been moved to Cancun, and I wouldn't be surprised if the final finishing line in terms of a legally binding treaty ends up being moved to South Africa," at the end of 2011.

"Copenhagen was the last get-out-of-jail-free card and we cannot afford another failure in Cancun," de Boer said. "(...) If we see another failure in Cancun, that will cause a serious loss of confidence in the ability of this process to deliver."

The Bonn talks exposed a rift between developed and developing countries over whether to pursue or quietly bury Copenhagen's main outcome.

This is the so-called Copenhagen Accord, brokered by a couple of dozen countries in frenzied late-night haggling as the summit faced collapse.

It sets a general goal of limiting warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), earmarks some $US30 billion ($A32.05 billion) in fast-track aid from 2010 to 2012 and sketches a target of mustering $US100 billion ($A106.84 billion) annually by 2020.

But the agreement came under fire from countries excluded from the small drafting group and failed to gain the endorsement of a 194-nation plenary. Around two-thirds of UNFCCC members have now signed up to it, though.

Some of the faultlines opened up again in Bonn.

The United States and the European Union (EU) said the Copenhagen Accord, despite its flaws, should be included in draft text for negotiations.

"We need a different paradigm and that's what emerges from Copenhagen," said top US delegate Jonathan Pershing to journalists.

Other countries were not keen about incorporating the Copenhagen Accord in the negotiating blueprint, reflecting concern about the document's purely voluntary emissions pledges and the way the deal was brokered.

Left-led nations in the Caribbean and Latin America attacked the Accord as undemocratic and a betrayal of UN principles. They called for negotiations to resume on the basis of a draft that was put on hold halfway through the Copenhagen meeting, delegates said.

After hours of debate, delegates agreed to give the chairwoman of the main working group, Margaret Mukahanana-Sangarwe, latitude to draw up a negotiating text.

The Copenhagen Accord was not specifically mentioned in this mandate, but Mukahanana-Sangarwe said orally it would be taken into account, along with other documents.

Two extra rounds of talks will take place before Cancun, the conference agreed.

Underpinning the UN talks is mounting evidence that manmade greenhouse gases - mainly carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels - are trapping solar heat in the atmosphere.

Within decades, changes to Earth's weather system could spell misery for many millions, hit by worsening drought, flood, rising sea levels and storms, say experts. (By JEROME CARTILLIER)

© 2010 AFP

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald

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BONN, Germany (Reuters) - Climate negotiators meet in Bonn on Friday for the first time since the fractious Copenhagen summit but with scant hopes of patching together a new legally binding U.N. deal in 2010.

Delegates from 170 nations gathered on Thursday for the April 9-11 meeting that will seek to rebuild trust after the December summit disappointed many by failing to agree a binding U.N. deal at the climax of two years of talks.

Bonn will decide a programme for meetings in 2010 and air ideas about the non-binding Copenhagen Accord, backed by more than 110 nations including major emitters China, the United States, Russia and India but opposed by some developing states.

The Accord seeks to limit world temperature rises to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F), but without saying how.

"We need to reassess the situation after Copenhagen," said Bruno Sekoli of Lesotho, who speaks on behalf of the least developed nations who want far tougher cuts in greenhouse gas emissions to limit temperature rises to less than 1.5 C.

Many nations favor progress on practical steps in 2010, such as aid to developing nations to combat climate change that is meant to total about $10 billion a year from 2010-12 under the Copenhagen Accord, rising to $100 billion a year from 2020.

Delegates said perhaps two extra sessions of talks were likely to be added before the next annual ministerial talks in Cancun, Mexico, from November 29-December 10. That would mean a less hectic pace than last year's run-up to Copenhagen.

"There has been a constructive attitude" in informal preparatory talks in Tokyo and Mexico, said Harald Dovland, a Norwegian official who is the vice-chair of U.N. talks on a new deal to succeed the existing Kyoto Protocol.

COPENHAGEN

But it is unclear what will happen to the Copenhagen Accord.

The United States is among the strongest backers of the Copenhagen Accord, but many developing nations do not want it to supplant the 1992 Climate Convention which they reckon stresses that the rich have to lead the way.

"I don't believe that the Copenhagen Accord will become the new legal framework," Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, told reporters in a briefing about Bonn last week.

He also doubted a legally binding deal would be reached in 2010, saying he hoped Cancun would agree the basic architecture "so that a year later, you can decide or not decide to turn that into a treaty." The 2011 meeting is in South Africa.

Wendel Trio, of environmental group Greenpeace, said many nations had to toughen their targets for curbing greenhouse gas emissions if they wanted to stay below a 2 degrees Celsius rise.

"The pledges so far will probably take us to somewhere between 3.5 and 4 degrees Celsius," he said. That would spur dangerous changes such as floods, heatwaves, droughts, more extinctions and rising sea levels.

In other signs of a revival of talks, the United States will host a meeting of major economies in Washington on April 18-19, top U.S. climate negotiator Todd Stern said on Wednesday.

He said he did not know if a legal U.N. treaty could be reached in 2010. One hurdle to a pact is that U.S. legislation to cap emissions is stalled in the U.S. Senate. (By Alister Doyle; Editing by Matthew Jones)

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Source: Reuters