Final pre-Paris talks conclude with extended draft for climate pact

United Nations negotiators on Friday wrapped up their work at the last round of climate talks before the upcoming Paris conference with an extended draft for a new global climate agreement set to be inked.

With 55 pages, the draft text was longer than its initial 20-page version tabled at the start of the five-day session, but was more balanced as missing positions, especially those from developing countries, were reinserted.

"It lays a better foundation for our further work in Paris," said Su Wei, China's chief climate negotiator.

Nearly 200 countries are expected to hammer out an agreement in Paris in December to deal with challenges of climate change after 2020.

Under the agreement, all countries will be required to take actions to mitigate and adapt to global warming. But how to differentiate this responsibility between developed countries and developing countries remains unanswered.

The developed countries, led by the European Union and the United States, want the developing ones to take the same emission reduction obligations as they do in the new agreement, arguing that the world has changed as some developing countries are becoming richer.

Developing countries, however, say they still need to eradicate poverty and improve livelihood, and their actions will depend on the support they get from developed countries whose carbon emissions in past centuries were the main cause of climate change.

Other major divergences include whether the agreement should involve a mechanism dealing with loss and damages caused by climate change and who should pay for the cost of climate actions of developing countries.

Developing countries want developed countries to regularly scale up their finance support from a floor of 100 billion U.S. dollars per year after 2020, while developed countries tend not to mention the figure in the agreement and ask developing countries to also join as "donors".

"Whether Paris succeeds or not will depend on what we have as part of the core agreement on finance," said Nozipho Mxakato-Diseko, the chairperson of the "G77 and China" which represents 134 developing countries.

She criticized developed countries for trying to ignore their legal obligations to provide finance support to developing countries required in United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) under which will sit the Paris agreement.

"This is a legal obligation under the Convention. It is neither 'aid' nor 'charity'," she said. Endit