Aug 14, 2009, 15:57 GMT
Bonn - Negotiations over a text to replace the Kyoto Protocol are proceeding so slowly that it is possible no deal will be reached at the climate-change conference in Copenhagen in December, the head of the UN's climate panel said Friday.
Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) said in Bonn, where four days of informal negotiations are ending, said: 'If we keep moving forward at this pace, we may not make it in time at Copenhagen.'
The Bonn meeting was to be an important staging point between last month's G8 Summit in Italy, where industrialized nations pledged to limit global climate change to 2 degrees above eighteenth-century levels, and the next round of UNFCC talks in Bangkok in September.
The goal is to have a basic text for a successor agreement to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol ready in time to be agreed at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference beginning on December 7.
De Boer said major problems included the fact that developing nations felt that the G8 should not be setting the world climate agenda, as they did in Italy, and that in any case a number of small island nations saw the 2-degree goal as too weak, being 'tantamount to the disappearance of a number of island nations.'
The funding of programs to mitigate the effects of already-present climate change, and to re-direct the world's economies towards 'green growth' was also a major sticking point.
The draft text for Copenhagen, already running to some 200 pages, still had some 2,500 items of disagreement within it, de Boer said.
'In a number of areas advances have been made. Things can be simplified, but in a process like this, nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. We need more time to get through the text as a whole,' he said.
The secretary said that there was flexibility in the emissions cuts already offered by industrialized countries including Australia, New Zealand, and the EU.
The EU has said that it aims to cut emissions by 20 per cent by 2020, and has added that cuts of 30 per cent would be possible if international agreement materialized.
De Boer offered an optimistic assessment of the US' American Clean Energy and Security Act , which is pending approval by the US Senate.
De Boer said that that bill could see the US cut emissions by up to 13 per cent.
While the agreement reached at the G8 summit was encouraging, de Boer said, the international community was not sufficiently focused on cooperation between rich and poor states, and that the developing economies could be sidelined at Copenhagen if the speed of negotiations did not improve.
Negotiators are due to meet under UNFCC auspices again in Bangkok on September 28.
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