The talks, involving 192 countries, will discuss tackling climate change beyond 2010, when the current Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gases expires.
UN negotiations for a global climate treaty resumed in Bangkok today amid bleak warnings that failure to break a deadlock ahead of a showdown in Copenhagen would threaten future generations.
The talks involving 192 countries are the latest session in nearly two years of haggling that have fallen far short of an agreement to tackle climate change beyond 2010, when the current Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gases expires.
The task in Bangkok is to thrash out a draft text for December's Copenhagen talks on the post-Kyoto treaty, but delegates are wrangling over the two key issues — cutting carbon emissions and meeting the associated costs.
"Our children and grandchildren will never forgive us unless action is taken. Time is running out, we have two months before Copenhagen," Thai prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said at the opening of the talks.
"Much needs to be done and much needs to be resolved. Let us use the two weeks in Bangkok to the full to ensure the future," he told around 2,500 delegates and representatives from business and environmental groups.
The Bangkok talks, part of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change(UNFCCC), run to October 9 and are the next to last negotiations before Copenhagen's deadline meeting.
UN climate chief Yvo de Boer said on the eve of the meetings in the Thai capital that there was intense pressure on the participants to agree on a text.
"We're arriving here in Bangkok with about, I think, a 280-page negotiating text which is basically impossible to work with," de Boer told AFP.
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