China offers last chance saloon to prevent Mexican standoff

The immediate future of the UN's long-running climate change negotiations will be decided in the Chinese city of Tianjin this autumn, after diplomats gathered in Bonn last week revealed that the global talks are once again near the brink of collapse.

Insiders had expressed hope that China's offer to host the last round of preparatory talks ahead of this year's crucial climate change summit in Cancun, Mexico, would underline its commitment to the negotiations and could pave the way for some sort of last-minute breakthrough.

Optimism was further stoked today by reports in the China Securities Journal that the Chinese government is preparing to publish a five trillion yuan ($739bn) investment plan for "newly developing energy industries", such as renewable, nuclear, clean coal and smart-grid technologies.

The plan has reportedly been submitted to the State Council for approval, prompting speculation that it could be formally announced at the Tianjin meeting as part of an attempt to kick-start the stalled negotiations.

However, any attempt to end the standoff between industrialised and developing countries will face numerous challenges after participants at the latest round of talks in Bonn said that the negotiations had reached their lowest point in several years.

Speaking to reporters at the close of the Bonn talks, the EU's co-lead negotiator Connie Hedegaard said the negotiations had "if anything, gone backwards".

Her fellow EU negotiator Artur Runge-Metzger said the week-long meeting had descended into "tit for tat" interventions that saw rich and poor nations repeatedly add to the official UN negotiating text that they were supposed to working to slim down. He added that it was vital for the upcoming Tianjin meeting to turn around the spirit of the negotiations and end the increasingly fractious standoff between the US and developing countries.

The polarisation between poorer nations and the US was fully evident last week as developing countries modified the negotiating text to include more ambitious emission-reduction pledges from industrialised nations and demand greater levels of financing to help them adapt to climate change.

The move was led by the Alliance of Small Island States, which accused rich nations of failing to sign up to emission targets in line with those recommended by climate scientists.

However, it prompted an angry response from the US delegation, who accused poorer countries of demanding what chief US negotiator Jonathan Pershing called "staggering sums out of line with reality".

Pershing also accused some countries of walking back from the Copenhagen Accord reached at last year's UN summit. But diplomats from poorer countries said the Copenhagen deal had always been weighted in favour of richer countries, arguing that the latest changes to the negotiating text had simply served to deliver a fairer and more balanced document.

Meanwhile, the US also reportedly clashed with the Chinese negotiating team over the vexed topic of how to verify whether countries are making good on emission-reduction pledges.

Recently appointed UN climate chief Christiana Figueres attempted to put a positive spin on the Bonn talks, but admitted that a huge amount of work needed to be done at the week-long meeting in Tianjin if there was to be any chance of meaningful progress being delivered at the Mexico summit.

"If you see the bigger picture, we have made progress here in Bonn," she said, adding that countries must "radically narrow down their choices" at the meeting in China.