196 nations near climate deal - Delegates to fall short of what is needed to reduce warming impact

CORAL DAVENPORT 

Activists dressed as (from left to right) Prime Minister Stephen Harper, President Xi Jinping, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Vladimir Putin protest at the climate change conferences being held in Lima, Peru. (AFP)

Lima, Dec. 13: Negotiators from around the globe were haggling today over the final elements of a draft climate change deal that would, for the first time in history, commit every nation to cutting its greenhouse gas emissions.

However, they would still fall far short of what is needed to stave off the dangerous and costly early impacts of global warming.

Delegates from the world's 196 countries have been working for two weeks here, in a temporary complex of white tents at the headquarters of the Peruvian Army, to produce the framework of a climate change accord to be signed by world leaders in Paris next year.

While UN officials had been scheduled to release the plan yesterday at noon, longstanding divisions between rich and poor countries kept them wrangling from last night.

At its core, the draft is expected to require every nation to put forward, over the next six months, a detailed domestic policy plan to cut its emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases from coal, gas and oil.

Those plans, which would be published on a UN website, would form the basis of the accord to be signed next December and enacted by 2020. That basic structure represents a breakthrough in the impasse that has plagued the UNs' 20 years of efforts to create a serious global warming deal.

Until now, negotiations had followed a divide put in place by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which required that developed countries act but did not require anything of developing nations, including China and India, two of the largest greenhouse gas polluters.

By requiring action from every country, the Lima framework will fundamentally change the old world order that stymied earlier climate change talks. But on its own, that political breakthrough will not achieve the stated goal of the deal: to stop the rate of global emissions enough to prevent the atmosphere from warming more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit over the pre-industrial average.

That is the point at which scientists say the planet will tip into dangerous and irreversible effects, such as melting sea ice, rising sea levels, increased flooding and droughts, food and water shortages, and more extreme storms.

Speaking to delegates here on Thursday, secretary of state John Kerry said, "We're still on a course leading to tragedy."

Given the current level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and the fact that the new plans would not be enacted until 2020, most experts say the best that can be hoped for is that the deal would cut emissions by about half as much as is needed to stop the 3.6-degree rise.

"Nobody here thinks an agreement will be a silver bullet that eliminates this threat," Kerry said. "But we can't get anywhere without an agreement."

By early today, delegates and negotiators were cautiously optimistic that a deal would emerge later, but the language was much weaker than many nations, particularly those most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, wanted to see. And even though the emerging deal represented progress on the old divide of rich and poor, those divisions were still evident as nations fought over details.

Developing nations have baulked at proposals that would allow aggressive outside monitoring and verification of each country's plan before a deal is signed next year.

The policy plans and the level of cuts each country commits to will be voluntary, and the final draft is unlikely to include a provision that would require a public adding of the plans and the creation of a new metric to show how many more cuts would be required to prevent the 3.6-degree temperature rise.

NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE