Climate change:

Progress seen on funding problem

PRANCE: The world’s biggest carbon polluters made headway in talks here Tuesday on how to beef up funding to help poor countries in the firing line of climate change, senior officials said.

The so-called Major Economies Forum (MEF) advanced on one of the key issues troubling negotiations for a new global treaty due to be crafted in Copenhagen in December, they said.

“We made progress on a major subject, which is finance and financial architecture. It’s not final, but one feels that there is a real consensus,” said French Ecology Minister Jean-Louis Borloo at the end of the two-day MEF meeting.

Todd Stern, the US special envoy for climate change, agreed. “We had quite constructive discussions, candid, frank,” Stern told a press conference.

“We made particularly good progress on the area of financing, which I would say is one of the two biggest issues in the Copenhagen negotiations.”

The Copenhagen accord would take effect from 2012, after the current commitments of the UN’s Kyoto Protocol expire.

The marathon process resumes in Bonn next Monday with talks aimed at hammering out a negotiation blueprint.

But developing and industrialised economies are far apart about how much money should be raised to help poor countries most exposed to the impacts of changing weather patterns.

Another stumbling block is how far countries will vow to cut their emissions of heat-trapping carbon gases in the coming decades. Scientists say swingeing reductions are needed to stave off potential catastrophe.

Both Borloo and Stern said the MEF environment ministers showed interest in a so-called “Green Fund” proposed by Mexico last year. Contributions to the fund would be based on a country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and its share of the world’s carbon pollution.

“I don’t have any objections to it,” said Stern.

“We have to go through the details of it and look at it carefully so I am not signing on to every jot and tittle, but (we thought it was) a general good idea and a highly constructive contribution.” The MEF, launched by US President Barack Obama last month on the back of an initiative by his predecessor, George W. Bush, aims at speeding the search for common ground among countries that together account for around 80 percent of annual greenhouse-gas emissions. It then intends to hand this consensus for approval by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the sprawling 192-nation global arena. Paris,

AFP