Post-Copenhagen quest for global warming accord stuck in reverse

Christian Science Monitor: Post-Copenhagen quest for global warming accord stuck in reverse

Negotiators seeking to lay the groundwork for a global warming summit in Mexico in November appear to be moving further from consensus.

With 3-1/2 months left before a United Nations climate summit in Cancun, Mexico, the spade work ahead of the meeting seems to be turning up more boulders than a New England plow.

Last week, negotiators from 194 countries met in Bonn, Germany, and made little progress in any of six broad areas covered by a join-if-you-like plan that emerged from last December's climate negotiations in Copenhagen.

Instead, it appears that the most significant progress on some issues will take place outside the UN process, where key countries are working to set up a "quick-start" adaptation fund for developing countries and approaches to increase efforts to combat deforestation.

Ironically, some specialists say, UN negotiations are becoming the venue for smaller sets of countries to work on these outside efforts.

If the size of the current UN negotiating text is any indication, the process to have been thrown into reverse – at least for now.

"The frustrating thing about the past week in Bonn is that the text doubled in size again," says Andrew Deutz, senior policy advisor for UN affairs at the Nature Conservancy. "If you want to get an agreement on the text by Cancun, we should be narrowing, rather than expanding." …

… Two bright spots, however, involve work on deforestation and adaptation aid, observers say.

"There's work that a lot of committed countries are doing" in these areas, says Pipa Elias, a climate-policy analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington.

In Copenhagen, negotiators made significant progress on these issues. And they were key elements in the Copenhagen Accord. Developed and developing countries that account for some 80 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions reportedly have signed on to the non-binding political agreement.

Many of these are working to set up the mechanisms to parcel out adaptation money and to govern anti-deforestation, or REDD, efforts without any formal UN agreement.