NEW DELHI/LONDON, (Reuters) – China and other big developing nations rejected core targets for a climate deal such as halving world greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 just five days before talks start in Copenhagen, diplomats said yesterday.
China, the world’s top emitter, together with India, Brazil and South Africa demand that richer nations do more and have drawn “red lines” limiting what they themselves would accept, the diplomats told Reuters. Their tough stance could moderate, however, if developing countries pledge steeper carbon pollution reductions of their own.
The four rejected key targets proposed by the Danish climate talks hosts in a draft text — halving global greenhouse gases by 2050, setting a 2020 deadline for a peak in world emissions and limiting global warming to a maximum 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times, European diplomats said.
But Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, told reporters he thought “there is a broad acceptance amongst those countries” on the 2 degrees Celsius, referring to China, India, Brazil and South Africa. De Boer spoke from Bonn and was participating in a teleconference previewing the two-week Copenhagen summit that begins on Monday.
Developing nations want richer countries to do much more to cut their emissions now before they agree to global emissions targets which they fear may shift the burden of action to them, and crimp their economic growth.
“We cannot agree to the 50/50 (halving emissions by 2050) because it implies that … the remaining (cuts) must be done by developing countries,” South Africa’s chief climate negotiator Alf Wills said, partly confirming the EU diplomats’ comments.
Rich nations’ carbon offers so far were far below those recommended by a U.N. panel of scientists, Wills told Reuters, making clear that developing nations could change their stance if industrialized states tightened their carbon targets.
“In India…there are 400 million people that don’t have access to electricity. Asking a country like that to reduce its emissions in absolute terms means that 400 million people without electricity is not enough and…maybe they should be thinking about 800 million. That doesn’t make any sense,” de Boer said.
The dispute underscored a rich-poor rift which has haunted the two-year talks to agree a new global climate deal to succeed the Kyoto Protocol in 2013 and dampens hopes of rescuing the Dec. 7-18 Copenhagen summit.
A legally binding deal is already out of reach for the U.N. talks, with only a political deal possible.