Climate talks to shift gears

Negotiators in Paris agreed on a draft for a climate change deal Saturday, but not everyone agrees on the best way to move forward on the issue.

The senior government officials signed off on the draft text, running to 42 pages, minutes before a midday (1100 GMT) deadline after working through the night.

The conclusion of the draft agreement marks a critical point after four years of negotiations as it demonstrates the will of all parties to reach an agreement. But ultimately at the end of this conference we must come together and provide the answer to that third and final question: “yes, we will change”.

But weaker nations most at risk want a much tougher target of 1.5 C, which would require the global economy to transform away from fossil fuels and be fully reliant on renewables by 2050.

Small island nations most vulnerable to rising sea levels and stronger storms, which are often railroaded by the powerful in the UN talks, also expressed cautious optimism about the draft agreement. Negotiators seem confident they can avert a repeat of a similar effort that failed spectacularly in the 2009 edition of the annual UN talks in Copenhagen, which aimed at a post-2012 deal but broke down, riven by recriminations between rich and poor nations.

“We had hoped that our work would be further advanced”, said Nozipho Mxakato-Diseko of South Africa, who speaks on behalf of more than 130 developing nations.

There is still no agreement on how much the average global temperature should be able to rise.

Jake Schmidt of the Natural Resource Defense Council, a New York-based environmental group, said the issue could be resolved by avoiding words like “shall” in key paragraphs about emissions targets.

The 41-year-old actor was joined by his dad George DiCaprio while attending the event, which saw a thousand mayors from different cities gather at Paris city hall to talk about climate change.

“At this point in Copenhagen, we were dealing with a 300-page text and a pervasive sense of despair”, said Martin Kaiser, global climate negotiations head at Greenpeace.

With the first week of the United Nations climate summit coming to a close, the world appears increasingly nearer to reaching to an worldwide deal on climate action.

According to the Guardian in the U.K., China’s chief climate-change negotiator, Su Wei, compared the talks with a recipe, saying, “It has laid a solid foundation for next week… like when we cook a meal, you need to have all the seasonings and ingredients and recipes, but next week is the actual cooking”. Many Congressional Republicans doubt global warming is real, or fear that stringent controls of carbon emissions could kill jobs.

Also in brackets is a statement noting that the largest share of historical global emissions has originated in developed countries, while per-capita emissions in developing countries are still relatively low and that the share of their global emissions will grow to meet their social and development needs.

“It’s exciting that we’ve reached this point, but the text is still riddled with unresolved issues, and a huge divide remains between developed and developing countries in terms of who should do what”, Green Party MP Julie Anne Genter said.

Developed nations, responsible for most carbon emissions and are opposing such provisions, opt to keep the issue for future discussion instead.

But major developing countries including India and China are pushing back, amid worries that wealthy countries are trying to dodge their responsibilities.