With deadline looming, UN climate talks fall short

UN talks ending on Thursday failed to hammer out a draft of the “operating manual” that would bring the landmark Paris climate treaty to life, forcing governments to add an emergency negotiating session ahead of a December climate summit.

“We have been here for two weeks and fell short of what was foreseen,” Elina Bardram, the European Union’s top climate negotiator, told AFP. “We were not even close.” The 197-nation Paris Agreement, inked in 2015, calls for capping global warming at “well under” two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), and 1.5 C if feasible.

The global thermometer has risen by one degree since the mid 19th-century, enough to see a crescendo of climate-en- hanced droughts, floods, heat waves and superstorms.

Voluntary national pledges to reduce carbon pollution would still allow temperatures to rise by three degrees or more, unleashing forces that could pull at the fabric of civilisation, say scientists.

The agreement also promises at least USD 100 billion (85 billion euros) per year from 2020 to help poor countries wean their economies from fossil fuels and cope with climate impacts, present and future.

But the devil is in the details, almost all of which remain to be ironed out.

How will national pledges to slash greenhouse gas emissions be measured and verified? By whom? Should China, India and other emerging economies be held to the same standards as Europe, Japan and the United States? On money, where are the billions promised going to come from? Will they be loans or grants, from governments or banks? These and hundreds of other questions need to be sorted by the end of the December 3-14 UN climate summit in Katowice, Poland.

But during the 11-day talks in Bonn “the pace of work was too slow,” said Amjad Abdulla, chief climate negotiator for The Maldives and spokesman for dozens of small island states threatened by rising seas.