International delegates have failed to reach a concrete agreement in the UN climate change conference that concluded on Friday in Bonn, Germany.
Representatives from 170 nations were far from agreeing on how to curb global warming during their negotiations in Bonn, said Yvode Boer, the United Nations' top climate-change official.
The 27-nation European Union favors binding national targets for emissions reductions, while the United States remains against such plans for fears of hurting economic growth, proposing global targets only for individual industries.
Negotiators also have friction on the timetable for emissions reductions, because most countries outside the European Union, including the United States, Canada and Japan, have boosted emissions since 1990 and some countries want to use 2005 instead of 1990 as the "baseline" for future reductions.
Developing nations such as China and India believed that developed nations such as Japan, the United States and those in Europe should be responsible for the bulk of emissions since the industrial age began and must act first.
Environmentalists accused the United States, Canada and Australia of doing most to slow the talks. They gave praise to initiatives by countries including China, Brazil, Switzerland and Norway.
Bill Hare, coming from the Greenpeace environmental group, said wealthy countries had failed to offer concrete suggestions or creative solutions, and nearly all the innovative ideas came from developing countries.
Among the proposals receiving the most attention in Bonn was a plan by Mexico to create a new global fund into which all countries would contribute, possibly based on GDP or their rate of carbon emissions. Poorer countries could then draw on the fund to adapt to climate change.
De Boer also expressed his worries over the sluggish progress, saying that "the challenge to come to that agreement remains daunting."
Negotiators have agreed to transfer practical technology to Africa, small island states and the least developed countries and set indicators to monitor and evaluate the progress on technology transfer efforts.
But those agreements are very general, and "what is required are more targeted proposals," said Luiz Figueiredo Machadot, chair of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention.
Meanwhile, De Boer pointed out that "a clever financial architecture generating the money that developing countries will need to green their economies and adapt to the inevitable effects of climate change" is still a challenge.
Some 2,000 negotiators from 170 countries attended the two-week meeting, discussing how to replace the Kyoto Protocol treaty, which binds 37 signatory nations to emissions cuts and expires in 2012, with a new deal. After Bonn, negotiators will travel to Accra, Ghana, in August and Poznan, Poland, in December to continue discussions.
The meeting was the second of its kind this year under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change since a "roadmap" accord was reached in Bali, Indonesia, last December, paving the way for the new global deal on climate change expected to be settled in December 2009 in Copenhagen.
Source:Xinhua
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