UN confirms extra Bonn climate meeting

After months of speculation, the UN has today confirmed it will schedule an additional climate change meeting in April in an attempt to kickstart faltering international negotiations ahead of November's crucial summit in Mexico.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change said it would host an extra three-day meeting in Bonn, Germany, from 9-11 April.

The decision was made at a meeting yesterday of the 11-member Bureau of the Conference of the Parties, following a series of behind-the-scenes consultations with diplomats involved in last year's Copenhagen Summit.

The summit had been expected to deliver an international deal to curb global carbon emissions, and as a result only two follow-up meetings were scheduled for this year: a two-week summit in early June in Bonn, and the annual Conference of the Parties summit in Mexico from 29 November.

However, with the Copenhagen Summit ending only with the vague commitments contained in the non-binding Copenhagen Accord, diplomats had raised concerns that there was insufficient negotiating time scheduled to resolve the many deadlocks that marred the Copenhagen meeting.

A series of problems remain unresolved, ranging from the long-standing stand-off between rich and poor nations over the scale of emissions targets and climate financing, through to technical issues relating to carbon trading, emission reporting and even the structure of the negotiations.

UNFCCC executive secretary Yvo de Boer, who surprisingly resigned last week and will step down from his post following the second Bonn meeting in June, said the UN had moved swiftly to schedule the extra meeting and help restore momentum to the negotiations.

"Following the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, this constitutes a quick return to the negotiations," he said. "The decision to intensify the negotiating schedule underlines the commitment by governments to move the negotiations forward towards success in Cancun."

The move also raises the prospect of further meetings being added to the negotiating process, most likely in the early autumn in the run-up to the Mexico Summit.

The announcement came as the UN also confirmed that support was still coming in for the Copenhagen Accord.

Under the terms of the Accord, which was brokered in the frantic final hours of the Copenhagen Summit, countries were invited to signal their support for the agreement by providing information on their emissions targets or climate action plans for 2020 by the end of January.