Climate change draft leaves major issues unresolved

Los Angeles Times (TNS)

PARIS

Negotiators from nearly 200 countries Saturday adopted a draft text that left many issues unresolved before high-level talks this week aimed at reaching a global agreement to fight climate change.

The document is full of competing options that will have to be disentangled when foreign and environmental ministers start meeting Monday at Le Bourget, on the northern edge of Paris.

“Major political issues must still be resolved,” French envoy Laurence Tubiana said at Saturday’s meeting. “It will take all our energy, intelligence, ability to compromise, ability to take a long-term view, to reach a result.”

After years of talks, many negotiators had hoped to accomplish more in the first week of the United Nations conference that opened Monday and is scheduled to end Friday. But they said there was still time to reach a deal to slow greenhouse-gas emissions.

“It’s certainly not the agreement we’re looking for in any number of ways,” Todd Stern, the lead U.S. negotiator, said as diplomats were finalizing the draft Friday. But, he said, “I have high hopes it’s an agreement we will like in the end.”

The conference’s French organizers say they are determined not to repeat the failures of climate talks in 2009 in the Danish capital, Copenhagen.

Leaders representing countries that account for more than 95 percent of global emissions arrived with proposals to reduce their output. But the plans fell short of the target of limiting temperature increases this century to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, the threshold at which scientists believe most of the worst effects of climate change could be avoided.

Closing the gap is proving to be difficult.