UPDATE - Hard bargaining at UN climate talks in Morocco
Date: 09-Nov-01
Country: MOROCCO
Author: Gilles Trequesser
"It will go on through the night," a European Union delegate said of the tough negotiations at the Marrakesh United Nations conference on climate change set to end on Friday.
A total of 164 countries have gathered in Morocco for two weeks of talks to agree on a set of rules that will govern the working of the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 treaty drafted in Japan that will affect the way countries produce energy.
The pact is the first international treaty to set binding limits on countries' emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2) from power stations and vehicles, blamed for warming the earth and wreaking havoc on the environment.
The treaty, which requires industrialised countries to cut emissions by an average of five percent by 2012, survived the withdrawal of the world's biggest emitter, the United States, in March, but has yet to enter into force as the remaining countries squabble over the legal fine print.
Despite a breakthrough earlier in the week on ensuring countries meet their pollution reduction targets under the Kyoto Protocol, the European Union's chief at the talks was cautious.
"I am not optimistic. I am not pessimistic. I am here to negotiate. I am here to be tough. The Marrakesh summit is one more in a series of tough negotiations," Olivier Deleuze, who is also Belgium's Energy Minister, told reporters.
WHAT SANCTIONS TO IMPOSE?
One of the thorniest issues - agreeing on what sanctions to impose on a country failing to make required pollution cuts - was settled in principle by government officials on Tuesday.
But delegates said even this remained unresolved until the whole package of technical issues was agreed.
"I don't think this is tied down," British Environment Secretary Margaret Beckett told Reuters. "A lot of issues on compliance are tied down, but there are still some people looking at the language in which these things are expressed."
Nothing will be legally agreed until a plenary session planned on Friday. Delegates said the tentative agreement on compliance could fall apart because of linkages with other tricky and highly technical issues yet to be solved.
One of these was Russia's insistent demand for an increase in the amount of emissions reductions it is allowed to offset by counting the carbon stored in its trees and farmlands, a figure set out in a deal made at an earlier conference in Bonn in July.
The EU has repeatedly said it was out of the question to renegotiate the Bonn agreement as it could open a "Pandora's box" of demands for renegotiation by other countries.
But Iran, the head of the biggest negotiating bloc, the G77 group of developing countries, indicated it might accept a change to the Russian numbers "as an exceptional case".
Moscow holds an ace card at the negotiations.
Following the U.S. abrupt withdrawal, Russia's ratification of the Kyoto pact is essential to make the treaty quorate, since it needs to be accepted by at least 55 countries responsible for 55 percent of the world's CO2 emissions in 1990.
New Zealand became the first of the so-called "umbrella countries" - nations, including Russia, seen as Kyoto-sceptics that used to negotiate alongside Washington - to announce its firm intention to ratify the 1997 pact.
"We are the first umbrella group nation to have made such a commitment, although we confidently predict that we will be in good company before too long," New Zealand Environment Minister Peter Hodgson told the plenary session.
"The chances of the (Kyoto) Protocol coming into force in South Africa next year are now good," he said in reference to the World Summit on Sustainable Development scheduled for September 2002 in Johannesburg.
(Additional reporting by Robin Pomeroy).