UN reaches greenhouse gas reduction agreement

CLIMATE negotiators agreed a pact yesterday that would for the first time force all the biggest polluters to take action on greenhouse gas emissions, but critics said the action plan was not aggressive enough to slow the pace of global warming.

The package of accords extended the Kyoto Protocol, the only global pact that enforces carbon cuts, agreed the format of a fund to help poor countries tackle climate change and mapped out a path to a legally binding agreement on emissions reductions.

But many small island states and developing nations at risk of being swamped by rising sea levels and extreme weather said the deal marked the lowest common denominator possible and lacked the ambition needed to ensure their survival.

Agreement on the package, reached in the early hours of yesterday morning, avoided a collapse of the talks and spared the blushes of host South Africa, whose stewardship of the two weeks of often fractious negotiations came under fire from rich and poor nations.

“We came here with plan A, and we have concluded this meeting with plan A to save one planet for the future of our children and our grandchildren to come,” said South African Foreign Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, who chaired the talks.

“We have made history,” she said, bringing the hammer down on the Durban conference, the longest in two decades of UN climate negotiations.

Delegates agreed to start work next year on a new legally binding treaty to cut greenhouse gases to be decided by 2015 and to come into force by 2020.

The process for doing so, called the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action, would “develop a new protocol, another legal instrument or agreed outcome with legal force” that would be applicable under the UN climate convention. That phrasing, agreed at a last-ditch huddle in the conference centre between the European Union, India, China and the United States, was used by all parties to claim victory.

Britain’s Energy and Climate Secretary Chris Huhne said the result was “a great success for European diplomacy.”

“We’ve managed to bring the major emitters like the US, India and China into a roadmap which will secure an overarching global deal.”

US climate envoy Todd Stern said Washington was satisfied with the outcome: “We got the kind of symmetry we had been focused on since the beginning of the Obama administration. This had all the elements we were looking for.”

Yet UN climate chief Christiana Figueres acknowledged the final wording on the legal form a future deal was ambiguous: “What that means has yet to be decided.”

Environmentalists said governments wasted valuable time by focusing on a handful of specific words in the negotiating text, and failed to raise emissions cuts to a level high enough to reduce global warming.

Yesterday’s deal extends Kyoto until the end of 2017, ensuring there is no gap between commitment periods, but EU delegates said lawyers would have to reconcile those dates with existing EU legislation.