Call for urgency as climate negotiators meet

UN climate negotiators in Geneva are being urged to show urgency and compromise in crafting a draft for a global pact to be signed in December.

“I ask you to work with efficiency and a sense of compromise,” Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, Peru’s environment minister and president of the negotiations said yesterday at the opening of a six-day session.

Pointing to scientific warnings of a dangerous Earth-warming trend, he appealed to representatives to “work with an even higher sense of urgency.”

“This is not a competition among us. We are just one team for one planet,” he said.

Negotiations resumed after a ministerial-level meeting in Lima last December yielded a sprawling 37-page blueprint for the agreement that countries had in 2011 agreed to finalize by the end of this year.

To be signed in Paris, the pact must come into force by 2020 to further the UN goal of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius over pre-Industrial Revolution levels.

Scientists warn that on current greenhouse gas emission trends, Earth is on track for double that, a recipe for catastrophic droughts, storms, floods and rising sea levels. Last year was the hottest on record.

But the 195 nations gathered under the UN banner remain at odds, broadly on rich-developing country lines, and the Lima document is stuffed with options that reflect conflicting interests and demands on many fundamental points.

The goal of Geneva is to trim the document down to a workable draft for an official “negotiating text” to guide the process through to December.

Procedure requires an official draft text by the end of May, six months before the next Conference of Parties in Paris that will adopt the final version.

“This session in Geneva is the only session planned before May 2015,” the meeting’s co-chairman Daniel Reifsnyder of the United States told delegates.

He said the objective is to deliver on Friday at 6pm the negotiating text of the Paris climate agreement which “fully reflects the positions of all parties.”

South Africa, on behalf of a broad group of developing and poor nations, called for a show of good faith — including for rich countries to show how they intend keeping a promise to scale climate assistance up to US$100 billion by 2020.

“As the primary bearers of the impacts of climate change, we have been asked to do so much and have made so many concessions in these negotiations throughout the years. The group looks forward to seeing what our partners are prepared to bring to the table,” said ambassador Nozipho Mxakato-Diseko.

A key disagreement is the issue of “differentiation” — how to divide responsibility for curbing greenhouse gas between rich and poor nations.

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