Climate accord draft leaves big issues unresolved

The president of the proceedings, French foreign minister Laurent Fabius, announced that the new text contained significantly fewer brackets – denoting undecided areas – compared with a text released Saturday.

Australia’s environment ambassador Peter Woolcott – speaking on behalf a negotiating block of developed countries – told the conference the group had serious concerns about the text. However, a 1.5 degree goal would require developed countries to massively reduce their emissions and massively “scale up” their financial support to developing countries.

The new, streamlined text eliminated hundreds of relatively minor points of dispute.

But all of the biggest arguments had yet to be resolved.

One of the key battle lines is what cap on global warming to enshrine in the accord, set to take effect in 2020.

Issues which still need firming up include what temperature should global warming be held to ( a 2 degree Celsius rise over pre-industrial levels, or the 1.5 Celsius that more than 100 developing nations say is the only safe level to avert more storms, downpours and rising seas) and the extent of financial help developing countries will receive from richer governments to help them move to a low-carbon energy system.

It is has become clear the current level of pledges are not enough to secure against the type of climate-related problems we could all be affected by, like food security and extreme weather.

India had come out very strongly against Kerry’s remark in an interview in which he had termed India as a “challenge” in the crucial climate change conference.

“I will support the goals of this coalition in the nights and the days to come”, said Barbara Hendricks, the German environment minister, at a press conference at the negotiating venue on the outskirts of Paris on Wednesday.

Emerging economies have said such demands failed to recognise rich nations’ historical responsibility of emitting greenhouse gases and warming the planet.

Describing the latest draft as the “starting point for the final push”, Javadekar said there were many “points of departure” at this stage of negotiations and much work is need to reach a point of convergence.

Fabius tasked the teams with presenting a final, improved draft on Thursday afternoon – which would allow for translation into the UN’s official languages in time for the deal to be sealed by a deadline of 6pm (1700 GMT) on Friday. “We need a figure of 1.5c”.

“We are not there yet”.

We are still on track.

‘There’s a kind of deflating sense of disappointment because there was an expectation that we would have got a bit further on, ‘ she told AAP in Paris. That is one of the main reasons that environmental groups are pressing negotiators to agree to review their targets before a previous agreement expires in 2020.

Rich countries promised in Copenhagen six years ago to muster $100 billion (92 billion euros) a year from 2020 to help developing nations make the costly shift to clean energy, and cope with global warming impacts.

China has considered itself a developing country for purposes of climate negotiations for more than 20 years.

“I think what they have done is sort of cut out a lot of the fat”. Nor does it settle on a mechanism to review the pledges made by countries and verify that they are living up to their commitments.

Senior Senate Republicans continued Wednesday to cast doubt on the effectiveness of a potential climate deal in Paris while calling again for a round of congressional votes on the agreement.

The minister said that while it was essential to raise the ambition of climate actions to be taken by the countries, it was also necessary to operationalise the principle of differentiation, which asks the developed countries to take the primary responsibility in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and also in helping the other countries fight climate change. But clearly, “there is more work to be done”.