Climate officials admit 'no treaty' likely at summit

May 4, 2010, 18:11 GMT

   Berlin - A flicker of life has entered lagging world negotiations on cutting fossil-fuel emissions, but officials conceded Tuesday that a world summit this year in Cancun, Mexico would fail to produce any grand treaty.

As officials from 40 nations wound up 'informal' talks in the German city of Bonn, there were calls to rub out the 2012 expiry date on the Kyoto Protocol and allow that global-warming treaty - agreed to back in 1997 - to run a little longer, if need be.

   But Connie Hedegaard, the European Union (EU) commissioner covering climate issues, said she detected no change in policy from the United States and China, the two nations which locked horns at the failed climate summit in Copenhagen last December.

   'I didn't hear any new message from them,' she said in an interview.

That left officials struggling to report some good news from the meeting in the Petersburg luxury hilltop hotel near Bonn.

Norbert Roettgen, the German environment minister who hosted the event together with the Mexicans, said another minister had praised the Bonn talks for at least 'breaking the ice.'

Activist nations said they would try to play a part with cash pledges to help preserve forests that are useful carbon sinks.

Roettgen said the officials had appealed to China and the United States to help renew the Kyoto Protocol for a while.

'We are willing to continue these commitments,' he said. 'We have to discuss what the contributions from China and the United States would be in that scenario.'

   Yvo de Boer, the UN diplomat from the Netherlands who is soon to give up his job as executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, insisted that 'Cancun won't be a failure,' but conceded it would not produce a ready-to-sign treaty.

   But he predicted 'substantial results' on the way to a 'functioning architecture' to fight global warming.

   The international community has been talking about setting world emission quotas and providing financial aid to poor nations to encourage them to use low-carbon technologies.

   Hedegaard, who is Danish, said she had found a 'constructive atmosphere' at the Bonn talks.

   German Environment Minister Roettgen pledged at the talks that Berlin would donate 350 million euros (465 million dollars) to poor nations for forest conservation and 850 million euros for technology conversion by 2012.

   Both would help to reduce the carbon overload in the air. Roettgen aides said Norway and France, meanwhile, would pay for activity to save rain forests. Ministers said practical action now would help slow down global warming.

A German environmentalist group, BUND, said as the Bonn talks ended that they had been 'a positive sign that serious climate negotiations are likely to resume.' Another ecology group, NABU, agreed that rolling over the Kyoto Protocol would be better than nothing.