The two week conference which started on November 26 enters it final day today with a host of issues unresolved, including a standoff over how much money financially stressed rich countries can spare to help the developing world tackle global warming.
That issue has overshadowed the talks since they started last week in Qatar, the first Middle Eastern country to host the slow-moving annual negotiations aimed at crafting a global response to climate change.
Tensions built up on Thursday the penultimate day on the schedule as the Philippines called for action to keep global warming in check, citing the devastation caused by a powerful typhoon that killed about 350 people.
The country’s climate change ambassador, Nederev Sano appealed to the world leaders, to open their eyes to the stark reality that the world is facing.
Sano said an important backdrop for his delegation is the profound impacts of climate change that they are already confronting.
“As we sit here, every single hour, even as we vacillate and procrastinate here, the death toll is rising," he added.
Developed countries, many of which face unpopular austerity measures at home, are being asked to show how they intend to keep a promise to raise climate funding for poor countries to $100bn per year by 2020 – up from a total of $30bn in 2010-2012.
Developing countries say they need at least another $60bn between now and 2015 to deal with the fallout from climate change, such as rising sea levels, and convert to cleaner energy.
Least Developed Countries’ chairperson Pa Ousman Jarju told the meeting that, his members are not going to leave Doha with promises upon promises,.
The Gambian, Ousman Jarju said the minimum that they can get out of COP18 is a demonstration that there will be $60bn on the table moving onward.
The European Union and the United States have refused to put concrete figures on the table in Doha for new 2013-2020 climate funding, even as pledges have trickled in from individual EU member states.
National pledges by Germany, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and the EU Commission in Doha totalled more than $8.95bn for the next two years – more than in 2011-12.
Only a handful of countries Lebanon, the Dominican Republic, Belarus and Ukraine set new goals for curbing greenhouse gas emissions during the Doha meeting.
UN climate conferences, bringing together nearly 200 nations, are notorious for missing deadlines.
From the start, the Doha talks had low ambitions, so failure would be less spectacular than at a UN summit in 2009 when world leaders including US President Barack Obama fell short of a new, global package to combat climate change.
Post published in: News