CANCÚN, Mexico — Weary delegates from almost 200 nations struggled through all-day talks Friday to cobble together final decisions wrapping up the U.N. climate conference, small steps to revive the faltering, years-long talks to guard the Earth against global warming.
No grand compact mandating deep cuts in global-warming gases was in the cards. Instead, the two-week session focused on a proliferation of secondary issues — a Green Climate Fund to help poor nations, deforestation, technology sales and other matters.
The cross-cutting interests of rich and poor nations, tropical and temperate, oil producers, desperate islanders and comfortable continental powers all combined to tie up the annual negotiating session of environment ministers down to its scheduled final hours.
In late afternoon, after many hours behind closed doors at a sprawling beachside resort hotel, leaders of the negotiating groups submitted the latest, slimmed-down versions of the main proposed texts for review.
“Almost through”
“We are almost through this process,” Mexican Foreign Secretary Patricia Espinosa, the conference president, told delegates. “Let’s go back to our work and let us finish as soon as possible.”
Negotiators earlier reported progress on the key issue of the Green Climate Fund, which is to aid developing nations obtain clean-energy technology for cutting their own greenhouse-gas emissions and adapt to potentially damaging climate change — by shifting agricultural practices, for example, and building seawalls against the rise of warming seas.
In the Copenhagen Accord that emerged from last year’s climate summit in the Danish capital, richer nations promised $100 billion for such a fund by 2020.
“There is a consensus that we set up a climate fund,” Bangladesh’s state minister for environment, Mohammed Hasan Mahmud, reported Friday.
Details of oversight, such as its governing board’s balance between rich- and poor-nation representatives, were left to post-Cancún negotiations.
Mahmud lamented that once again a hoped-for overarching pact to slash global emissions was being deferred at least another year, to the 2011 conference in Durban, South Africa.
“I doubt if the Durban (conference) will deliver the desired level of results if the negotiations go the way we have been going through here,” he said.
In the 1992 U.N. climate treaty, the world’s nations promised to do their best to rein in carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases emitted by industry, transportation and agriculture.
In the two decades since, the annual conferences’ only big advance came in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, when parties agreed on modest mandatory reductions by richer nations.
China biggest emitter
But the U.S., alone in the industrial world, rejected the Kyoto Protocol, complaining it would hurt its economy and that such emerging economies as China and India should have taken on emissions obligations.
Since then, China has replaced the U.S. as the world’s biggest emitter, but it has resisted calls that it assume legally binding commitments — not to lower its emissions, but to restrain their growth.
In Cancún, such issues came to a head, as Japan and Russia fought pressure to acknowledge in a final decision that they will commit to a second period of emissions reductions under Kyoto, whose current targets expire in 2012.
Hot issues in Cancún
Issues facing last-minute negotiation in Cancún:
• Setting up a global structure to make it easier for developing nations to obtain patented technology for clean energy and climate adaptation.
• Pinning down more elements of a complex, controversial plan to compensate poorer nations for protecting their climate-friendly forests.
• Taking voluntary pledges of emissions controls made under the Copenhagen Accord by the U.S., China and other nations, and “anchoring” them in a Cancún document, giving them more formal U.N. status.
• Agreeing on methods for monitoring and verifying that developing nations are fulfilling those voluntary pledges.
