Frustration growing at snail’s pace in UN climate talks

Frustration is growing at the snail’s pace of progress on a deal to combat climate change. As a December deadline looms, diplomats wrangling over the text of the pact kicked the can further down the road yesterday, frustrated at their own lack of progress. On the final day of a crucial negotiating round in Bonn, delegates turned to the joint chairmen of the UN forum for help in editing the unwieldy blueprint into a more manageable format. The duo, Algeria’s Ahmed Djoghlaf and Daniel Reifsnyder of the United States, promised to have a streamlined version ready in time for the next round of Bonn talks from October 19-23. Crucially, these will be the final five days of official negotiations to prepare for the much-anticipated November 30-December 11 Paris conference tasked with sealing the long-sought universal climate deal. “We have only 1,800 minutes to agree on the draft package for Paris,” Djoghlaf said. “Every minute has value.” The pair also announced that a dedicated “drafting committee” will be created to start work as soon as negotiators reassemble. As it stands, the text is an 83-page tome with contradictory country proposals on how to deal with the global warming threat. The Paris agreement is meant to slow the march of dangerous global warming by slashing climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions from mankind’s unbridled burning of fossil fuels. The overarching goal is to limit average warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-Industrial Revolution levels. But there are fundamental disagreements on how to share out carbon-emissions cuts between rich nations, which have polluted for longer, and emerging giants such as China and India powering fast-growing economies and populations. Poor nations are also looking to developed-country partners for commitments of financial and technological aid for their shift to greener energy, and adapting to a new world disfigured by climate change. Meanwhile, analysts have warned that inadequate national targets for curbing climate-altering greenhouse gases mean emissions will be “far above” the level required to stave off disastrous global warming. So far, 56 governments have submitted pledges, known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions or INDCs, to a UN roster that will form the backbone of the universal climate-rescue pact. New satellite data reveals a rapid loss of tropical forests in Cambodia, parts of west Africa and Madagascar, and the Gran Chaco region of South America.Overall, the world last year lost some 18mn hectares (45mn acres) of tree cover, more than half of it in the tropics, the World Resources Institute (WRI) says. That is doubly bad news for the fight against climate change because the destruction of carbon-rich forests releases greenhouse gases and diminishes one of Earth’s CO2-trapping “lungs”.