The Weekend Australian
Source: The Times, AFP
Barcelona: A world treaty on climate change will be delayed by up to a year and is likely to be watered down because countries with the highest greenhouse gas emissions are refusing to commit to legally binding reductions.
Negotiations before the UN climate talks in Copenhagen were "not going well'', British Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband warned yesterday.
Mr Miliband indicated the meeting, being convened to agree on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, could be the precursor to a legally binding treaty, rather than yielding one itself.
British officials said the best that could be hoped for was that national leaders would make ``political agreements'' on emission cuts and payments to help poor countries to adapt.
These agreements would be non-binding, however, and could later be revised or rescinded by national parliaments.
At pre-summit talks in Barcelona, the officials said the final agreement would not emerge until at least six months after the Copenhagen summit, which ends on December 17. They said they hoped another meeting would be convened by next December to allow leaders to sign the treaty.
The admission that no treaty will be signed at Copenhagen marks the failure of the process agreed at a UN meeting in Bali in December 2007, when industrialised countries agreed to deliver a binding climate-change agreement within two years. The delay has angered developing countries, which say they are already suffering from man-made climate change.
The Global Humanitarian Forum, based in Geneva, has estimated that more than 300,000 people are killed each year by climate change, nearly all of them in poor countries.
Delegates from 190 countries are now trying to agree to a new timetable for signing, but it is unlikely to contain a clear deadline. Artur Runge-Metzger, the European Commission's negotiator on climate change, said in Barcelona that the absence of commitment from the US on emission cuts was a key factor contributing to the delay, although other countries were also to blame.