No deal in sight: Africa calls timeout on talks

With the climate change conference in its final days, developing countries, led by those from Africa, on Monday expressed their deep displeasure over the lack of progress in finalising the emission reduction targets for the rich countries and threatened to block the negotiations until this was done.

Most of the meetings in the morning were stalled, until conference president Connie Hedegaard, who is the energy and climate minister of Denmark, decided to call an informal meeting of the member countries to have ?open-ended discussions? on this issue.

The informal meetings were likely to continue through the day on Monday, with their focus on decisions that need to be taken with regard to emission reduction targets for the rich countries, UNFCCC executive secretary Yvo de Boer said.

Hedegaard had a meeting with Indian environment minister Jairam Ramesh, in his capacity as a representative of the developing countries, to discuss the possible outcome of the conference. She assured Ramesh that there would be no attempt, either from the host country or from any other quarter, to force an agreement.

The protest by the African countries was fully supported by India, China and other members of the developing country grouping of G-77. Their concern was that most of the discussions over the last few days had centered around the official text that had come out of the working group on the Long-term Cooperative Action (AWG-LCA), whose mandate is to finalise actions in the long term to deal with climate change.

A similar stress on the official text that came out from the other working group (AWG-KP) that focuses on deciding the emission reduction targets for the rich countries for a period beyond 2012 when the Kyoto Protocol comes to an end, has been completely missing.

The two working groups were formed at the Bali climate change conference in 2007, and represent the parallel tracks that the negotiations have followed in the last two years.

The heads of these two working groups had each circulated a draft text last Thursday with the objective of developing it into an agreement at the end of the conference. Australia, EU and Japan have been saying that unless a legally binding framework on the LCA track emerged, they would not commit themselves to any target.

The richer countries are more interested in the LCA track because that involves actions to be taken by the developing nations as well. On the second commitment period for Kyoto Protocol, only the rich countries have to take legally-binding targets for emissions reductions.