UN: Necessary climate agreement unlikely in Copenhagen

The UN wants bigger cuts

The UN's top climate official today said global emissions reductions targets recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were unlikely to be delivered in Copenhagen climate talks later this year.

But he insisted that much could still be achieved with a view to agreeing targets at some point after the talks.

"I don't think in Copenhagen we're going to get an agreement on an 80 per cent global emission reduction [by 2050] and I think that, at the end of day, is what we need," Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), told the New Strait Times.

"What I would like to see come out of Copenhagen is a robust architecture to address climate change that is attractive to as many countries as possible so that we have a solid foundation to build on moving forward from there."

De Boer said that industrialised countries were still far short of pledging the cuts in heat-trapping greenhouse gases by 2020 demanded by scientists.

"We are still a long, long way from the ambitious emissions reduction scenarios of the IPCC that are a kind of a beacon in terms of what industrialised countries need to do if we are to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change," he said.

The developing world insists it will not shoulder more than its fair share of the burden for tackling global warming.

A 30-page draft negotiating text has exploded to more than 200 pages, which will have to be whittled down in future sessions to try to make haggling workable.

De Boer described a likely agreement at Copenhagen that would "deliver clarity on the political issues."

The four issues he named were targets for emissions cuts by industrialised countries; efforts by developing giants to limit the growth of their own emissions; funding to help poor countries cope with climate change and tackle their own emissions; and the "governance structure" of the future treaty.

"I think if Copenhagen can give clarity on those four points, what happens afterwards is fixing the details rather than a repetition of fundamental debates," he said.