Delegates gear up for tough bargaining at Copenhagen summit

Delegates geared up for a tough round of negotiation on climate change as a crucial summit opens today with top United Nations (UN) officials saying that emission reductions announced by key countries, including India, had put the world within reach of a global warming control pact.

Yvo de Boer, top UN climate official said there was unprecedented political momentum to clinch an ambitious deal but countries needed to negotiate harder.

"Time is up," de Boer said. "Over the next two weeks nations have to deliver". "Never in 17 years of climate negotiations have so many different nations made so many firm pledges together," he said referring to the emission target cuts announced by the US, China and India in the run up to the Copenhagen summit.

De Boer said Copenhagen was "already a turning point in the international response to climate change".

Along with 15,000 delegates, more than 100 world leaders including US President Barack Obama, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Chinese premier Wen Jiabao will attend the 12-day summit for which security has been beefed up.

For the summit, the conference venue at the Danish capital has been declared a UN territory. Though China, India, Brazil and other major nations of the G-77 group of developing nations have announced concessions, the group has hardened its stand on number of unattached proposals being floated around.

Ahead of the summit, representatives of the G-77 group of developing nations and China spent two days in a conference room here, discussing their strategy for the meeting and speculating on possible outcomes and their position on specific issues.

Major nations in the group are concerned over several drafts of a potential agreement that are floating around including the Danish proposal, which is yet to be fully disclosed.

These documents are outside the drafts being worked on by the working groups within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) called the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-Term Cooperative Action and the Ad Hoc Working Group on Kyoto Protocol that are charged with coming up with a text.

A draft has also been circulated recently by the Brazil, South Africa, India and China (BASIC) group. Several rounds of meetings under the UNFCCC banner have yielded around 15 negotiating papers and concerned parties believe at some point all will converge into one single text.

At the recent meetings, countries within G-77 stated that so many external texts and parallel process would not be manageable. Most are in favour of talks being continued through a formal process under the UN framework without any attempt to bring a deal to these issues through an external process.

Developing countries have maintained that given the fact that emissions from industrialising developed nations over the last century have been the primary cause of global warming, they should shoulder greater responsibility for carbon cuts.

According to de Boer developed countries will need to provide fast-track funding on the order of at least $10 billion a year through 2012 to enable developing countries to immediately plan and launch low emission growth and adaptation strategies and to build internal capacity.

Besides asking the developed nations to shoulder greater responsibility, the developing countries have also sought transfer of technology in the clean energy sector to make processes more environment friendly.

As the first commitment period for greenhouse gas emissions reductions, regulated by the Kyoto Protocol, would expire in 2012, the international community would endeavour to map out a plan for binding emissions cuts for the second commitment period from 2012 to 2020 at Copenhagen.

The Kyoto Protocol, adopted in Kyoto in 1997, sets legally binding targets for developed countries to reduce emissions -- a major feature of the pact. These amount to cuts of an average 5 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012.

Prior to the Kyoto Protocol, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was adopted in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, but no mandatory limits on emissions were set.

In the run up to the climate summit, environmental groups and NGOs around the world have built up pressure on world leaders to arrive at a deal that includes legally-binding carbon emission reductions.