No breakthrough in talks, it’s up to state

With just a few hours left before heads of state from around the world start addressing the climate summit, there was still no sign of a Copenhagen Agreement on Tuesday. The best that over 100 environment ministers assembled here have achieved is to avert a collapse of the UN conference.

A collapse looked a strong possibility during intense closed-door negotiating sessions between government delegates overnight, with rich nations sticking to their point that they would not do anything more to avert climate change unless emerging economies agreed to international inspections of their own actions.

This was rejected once more by China, India and South Africa. To add to that, the group of African countries and the Alliance of Small Island States wanted to walk out of the negotiations once more, because their concerns were not being addressed.

Then the emerging economies “saved the day”, India’s environment minister Jairam Ramesh said. Ramesh and environment ministers from China, Brazil and South Africa held separate meetings with other developing country groups and persuaded them to stay on and participate in the negotiations.

But the negotiations kept going backwards, with six new draft treaties presented overnight. Months of meeting0gs will follow if all of them are to be considered.

Two years back, the Copenhagen summit was supposed to be the deadline by which a legally binding international treaty to tackle climate change would be ready for signatures. But now the best observers hope for is a non-binding political declaration of intent. —IANS