Negotiators at the Paris climate summit have been working through the night to try to reach a global agreement, with talks in their final day. Delegates worked through Thursday night on a draft version which started from Wednesday to iron out the key barriers to an agreement.
It is expected that the deal will be signed on Friday, though the timings are uncertain.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who is chairing the summit, told negotiators: “I think we will make it.”
It is significant about a new global agreement (after discussions that began in 2011) that would stake out a long-term strategy for dealing with climate change. The deal signed here in Paris would come into being in 2020.
Getting Shorter:
Wednesday’s draft was 27 pages after several rounds of editing & discussions. The draft cut the options on the long-term goal of the proposed treaty.
Important Aspect:
The temperature rises must be kept “well below 2C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C”.
Adriano Campolina, from ActionAid, said,.”Rich countries have a responsibility to ensure a fair global deal for everyone, not just themselves, and as we move into these final hours of negotiations poorer countries must not settle for anything less.”
There was a mixed reaction with some finding positives & others the negatives.
There are still considerable difficulties about issues including climate finance and the question of demarcation between developed and developing countries.
Called “differentiation” in the negotiations, the richer nations want to change the way the world has been divided since 1992, when the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change came into being. They want that more emerging economies should take on more of the burden of cutting emissions and providing finance to the very poor nations hit by the impacts of rising temperatures. They insisted on a single system of verification of promises for all countries.
Elina Bardram, the EU’s chief negotiator told the reporter, “We feel that when parties have committed themselves to a national target that reflects their ambitions and abilities, they must be ready to tell the global community what type of progress is being made. In order for that conversation to make sense in the real world, we need to have accounting standards and principles that are common to all – otherwise you are simply comparing apples with pears.”
