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Climate Treaty Talks May Go On
For Another Year

By Michael von Bülow

06 November, 2009
Cop15 Site

“I don’t think we can get a legally binding agreement by Copenhagen. I think that we can get that within a year after Copenhagen,” UN climate chief Yvo de Boer said Thursday.

A global treaty to protect the world’s climate may need a whole extra year of negotiations, the United Nations’ top climate-change official, Yvo de Boer (photo above), said in an interview Thursday.

De Boer said insufficient progress has been made to conclude a treaty at the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen next month.

“I don’t think we can get a legally binding agreement by Copenhagen,” he told Bloomberg Television in Barcelona, where he’s overseeing the penultimate round of preliminary talks that end Friday.

“I think that we can get that within a year after Copenhagen,” he said.

A week of UN-led negotiations in Barcelona has highlighted the gap that divides rich and poor countries on fundamental issues such as emissions reduction and financing.

Developing countries are not satisfied with a political agreement in Copenhagen. They prefer a legally binding treaty – a “Kyoto 2” – that sets limits to industrialized countries’ greenhouse gas emissions.

“I do not know of anything called a politically binding agreement,” Lumumba Di-Aping, a Sudanese envoy, who speaks for a group of 130 developing nations and China, told reporters Wednesday.

“They are worth very little. Tell me of any politician who delivered on his political manifesto.”

Few delegates at the Barcelona talks seemed to believe Thursday that a legally binding climate pact is still within reach in Copenhagen. The discussion was rather how long the delay would be.

"There is a lot of work still to be done," said Artur Runge-Metzger, head of the European Commission delegation. Toughening the text to make it legally binding "should be done as early as possible...three months, six months," he told reporters according to Reuters.

John Ashe, chairman of a working group to extend the existing Kyoto Protocol, said failing a December deal, negotiators should wrap up at the next meeting in Bonn around May, as happened in 2000.

"We did it before, can do it again," he said.

Some other delegates said it could take longer, partly because domestic US climate legislation will not be ready this year despite a vote by a Senate panel on Thursday in favor of a Democratic climate bill.

A Japanese official said "unless it's agreed within six months after Copenhagen it will perhaps be the following year because of the US mid-term elections". About a third of the US Senate is up for re-election in November 2010.

A British official said it was likely to take "at least 6 months ... ideally no longer than a year" to agree details.

According to a roadmap laid out in Bali, Indonesia, in December 2007, international negotiations to agree on a successor to the legally binding Kyoto Protocol are to be concluded in Copenhagen in December 2009.


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