Deal in Durban: UN body agrees to forge new climate treaty

Under the agreement a Green Climate Fund of $100b would be created by 2020.

DURBAN: Some 194 countries at the UN climate change talks agreed a package of measures early on Sunday that would eventually force all the world’s polluters to take legally binding action against global warming, but environmental groups lamented the lack of resolve to cut emissions for the purpose.

After days of sometimes emotional debate, the chairwoman of the UN climate change conference hailed the four separate accords that made up the package of deals, including a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol, the design of a Green Climate Fund and a mandate to get all countries in 2015 to sign a deal that would force them to cut emissions no later than 2020, as well as a workplan for next year. “We came here with plan A, and we have concluded this meeting with plan A to save one planet for the future of our children and our grandchildren to come,” South African Foreign Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane said.

“We have made history,” she said, bringing the hammer down on more than two weeks of sometimes fractious talks in the South African port of Durban, the longest in two decades of UN climate talks.

“The Durban Platform represents a significant and forward agreement,” the UN leader said.

The roadmap, which is seen as a major weapon in the fight against climate change, for the first time will bring all major greenhouse-gas emitters under a single legal roof. If approved as scheduled in 2015, it will become operational in 2020.

The agreement would create a Green Climate Fund of about $100 billion by 2020.

US pleased at outcome

The Durban talks had been due to wrap up on Friday, but dragged into a second extra day on Sunday because of disputes over how to phrase the legal commitment.

“In the end, it ended up quite well,” said US climate envoy Todd Stern. “We got the kind of symmetry that we had been focused on since the beginning of the Obama administration. This had all the elements that we were looking for.”

Brazil, one of the globe’s emerging economic powers, said it too was pleased with the result. “I am relieved we have what we came here to get,” said Brazil’s climate envoy Luiz Alberto Figueiredo.

India’s Environment Minister Jayanthi Natarajan, who gave an impassioned speech to the conference denouncing what she said was unfair pressure on Delhi to compromise, said they had only reluctantly agreed to the accord.

“We’ve had intense discussions. We were not happy with reopening the text but in the spirit of flexibility and accommodation shown by all, we have shown our flexibility... we agree to adopt it,” she said.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 12^th, 2011.