Roundup: UN climate negotiations conclude with positive progress

The second round of the United Nations negotiations on climate change this year concluded here on Thursday with progress that parties and observers said was positive.

In the past two weeks, negotiators from nearly 200 countries worked on a draft text of a new global climate agreement that was set to be signed at the end of this year in Paris and come into force in 2020, trying to streamline the 90-page text with numerous options reflecting different views from parties to bring about a manageable and readable version for ministers and heads of governments to make decisions on.

Although only five pages were trimmed off the original draft after combining and deleting words repetition. Insiders said positive progress was achieved beyond the text.

"The progress could not be evaluated with the number of pages being cut," said Su Wei, China's chief negotiator, adding that the Bonn meeting helped clarify views from different parties and strengthen mutual understanding and trust.

"It cleaned the ground for our next round of substantive negotiations and provided a clearer basis with improved quality," Su said.

His opinion was echoed by Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), who said most of the "interesting progress" was not expressed in the text itself but in the understanding of the text and the way to continue to negotiations.

"It is really important to understand that this is a step by step process," she said.

Negotiators will have two more formal sessions in August and October with 10 negotiating days to deal with the draft before they go to Paris.

Several informal and high-level meetings, however, will be organized this year in order to inject political impetus. Among them are a high-level meeting convened by the President of the UN General Assembly Sam Kahamba Kutesa on June 29 in New York and two ministerial meetings held by French government in Paris in July 20-21 and Sept. 7.

"Those are sort of decision moments," said Jake Schmidt, International Program Director of Natural Resources Defense Council, a New York-based non-governmental organization.

"I think the substantive negotiations would begin informally," he said.

Main obstacles to reach a deal in Paris were divergences between developed and developing countries on allocation of emission reduction responsibilities and finance and technology support.

Developed countries request developing countries to take a similar binding responsibility of absolutely reducing carbon emissions as they themselves were obliged by their historical responsibility and strong capability to, whereas developing countries insist that a principle of "common but differentiated responsibility" must be respected in the new agreement and, due to their limited capability and needs to develop economy and phase out poverty, they could only make contributions to address climate change in various ways depending on the financial and technology support they received from developed countries.

During the Bonn meeting, a survey was conducted in 75 countries and regions around the world, asking 10,000 citizens their views on climate change and actions they think should be taken against the challenge.

According to the survey, nearly 80 percent of the world population are "very concerned" about the impact of climate change, 70 percent of citizens think it's a global responsibility to tackle the challenge, while 78.5 percent of people think developed countries should pay more than what they currently pledged to support mitigation and adaptation in developing countries.

Developed countries committed in 2009 to increase their finance support to developing countries to 100 billion U.S. dollars a year by 2020. A clear roadmap to meet the commitment, however, was never provided.

"We are all affected by climate change. None of us is exempt from the impact," said Figueres. "The action now is necessary." Endit