OSLO, (Reuters) – Hopes for a deal on climate change at U.N. talks in Mexico next month have faded, undermined by splits between America and China and by fears the 194-nation process is too unwieldy to work out a pact to slow global warming.
Experts told the Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit the Nov. 29-Dec. 10 annual meeting of environment ministers in Cancun might at best agree steps such as a new fund to help poor nations or ways to share green technology.
But there are risks of deadlock.
“If Cancun is a big disappointment, achieving nothing or not much, then I think a lot of governments around the world will start to say: What comes out of this process?” European Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard said.
“The world’s citizens will be sick and tired if all we achieve at Cancun is a blame game over who is to blame for not doing anything,” she said.
Most nations gave hopes of a quick all-encompassing treaty to curb greenhouse gases after world leaders at a 2009 summit in Copenhagen failed to work out a deal to avert projected heat waves, floods, droughts and rising sea levels.
Even a patchwork of smaller deals is now not certain for Cancun.
“We are in a very, very troubling situation,” said Achim Steiner, head of the U.N. Environment Programme, saying many nations blamed the economic downturn for less action.
But he predicted that factors including more extreme weather, such as the floods in Pakistan or the drought in Russia that pushed up grain prices, would eventually bring global cooperation on a binding U.N. deal.
Christiana Figueres, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, said that the Copenhagen summit had taught the world that there was no “magic bullet” to solve climate change.
She said Cancun can agree a set of decisions — such as on finance, technology or measures to protect tropical forests — that might be turned into a formal treaty at later meetings.
“Governments do need to double their efforts between now and Cancun,” she said.
Some experts say the talks could shift from the United Nations to other groups, such as the G20 which includes all big emitters — China, the United States, the European Union, Russia and India.
“The talks are going nowhere,” said Bjorn Lomborg, Danish author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist”. He said the world should abandon the U.N. process and agree to invest $100 billion a year in new clean technologies such as wind or solar power.
Figueres and Steiner said it was wrong to predict the demise of the U.N. track.
An objection to groups such as the G20 or G8 was that they excluded 3 or 4 billion people in poor nations, from Bangladesh to small island states in the Pacific, who have done little to cause global warming but are most at risk.
The world cannot afford to ignore their views, Steiner said.
“The multilateral process is … cumbersome and necessarily a slow process … but absolutely indispensable,” Figueres said.
Last week in China, a final round of preparatory talks for Cancun was hit by disputes between Beijing and Washington, the top greenhouse gas emitters, about how to share out responsibility for combating climate change.
