UN
climate talks have begun amid calls for action to head off worsening drought,
floods and storms but also to fears of a bust-up just two years after a near-fiasco
in Copenhagen.
Topping the agenda in Durban is the fate of
the Kyoto Protocol, the only worldwide pact with targets for curbing
heat-trapping emissions, whose first round of pledges expires at the end of
2012.
The conference must also push ahead with a
Green Climate Fund to muster up to $100 billion a year for climate-vulnerable
countries.
In a speech to the 194-nation forum, South
African President Jacob Zuma pointed to a series of disasters in his country as
a sign of warning.
"We have experienced unusual and severe
flooding in coastal areas in recent times, impacting on people directly as they
lose their homes, jobs and livelihoods," he said.
"Given the urgency, governments need to
strive to find solutions here in Durban. Change and solutions are always
possible, and Durban must take us many steps forward towards a solution that
saves tomorrow today."
But the mood has been soured by rifts over how
to share out the burden of emissions curbs, while the global economic crisis
casts a long shadow over the climate fund.
UN climate chief Christiana Figueres said the
12-day talks must urgently shore up public confidence.
"This conference needs to reassure the
vulnerable -- all those who have already suffered and all those who will still
suffer from climate change -- that tangible action is being taken for a safer
future," she said.
Divisions within the UN Framework Convention
on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are pitching rich against poor, rich against rich
and poor against poor.
Wealthy countries that are parties to the
Kyoto Protocol are baulking at developing-country demands to renew their
emissions vows beyond 2012.
Such a move, they argue, would be folly so
long as China, which as a developing economy has no specified targets under
Kyoto, and the United States, which abandoned the treaty in 2001, are not bound
by similar constraints.
"We will not make a second commitment to
Kyoto," Canada's environment minister, Peter Kent, said in Ottawa as he
called for a "new international agreement" encompassing all major
emitters. Canadian broadcaster CTV said Canada would formally withdraw from Kyoto
next month.
The European Union is the last bloc in the
developed world to champion Kyoto.
It is willing to take on a second round of
pledges, but on one condition: all major emitters should endorse the completion
of a legally binding global climate pact, perhaps by 2015, into which Kyoto
could be subsumed.
The last time a worldwide climate deal was
attempted was in Copenhagen, in December 2009, at a summit that notoriously
came within an inch of collapse.
In the end, a face-saving deal was brokered
among a small group of countries and it has developed into the voluntary matrix
which dominates the UNFCCC process today.
Countries register pledges for cutting
greenhouse gases in the goal of limiting warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6
degrees Fahrenheit), although the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) says current
promises fall far short of what is needed.
But US chief negotiator Jonathan Pershing was
cautious about the EU roadmap.
"We want to know more about the content
of such an agreement before we commit to a legal form," he said.
He said large emerging economies -- "and,
frankly, from what I can tell, Europe as well" -- had no intention to ramp
up their pre-2020 promises.
"It is in that context, of course, that
we come to a post-2020 agreement."
The 132-nation bloc of developing countries
hit at "some" rich countries "which insisted in inflexible
positions that would make real progress at this session quite difficult."
But within this bloc are small-island and
least-developed countries, who are dismayed by any delay in forging a new
treaty.
"It is headed towards a real impasse in
Durban, frankly, there is no way to gloss over it," a veteran observer
participating in the talks said on Sunday.
AFP
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