Government delegates stop in Bangkok on the road to Copenhagen
by Pooja Gupta
Today in Bangkok, on the heels of last week’s G20 Summit in Pittsburgh, world delegates embarked on the fourth of five major negotiating sessions before the UN Copenhagen Climate Change negotiations convene in December. The Bangkok meetings, scheduled to run until October 9, were preceded by the high-level UN Climate Change Summit called by Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon last week in New York. Although many of the 100 heads of state and government called for the enhancement of assistance for the world’s poorest and most vulnerable to adapt to the impact of climate change at last week’s UN summit, the G20 leaders in Pittsburgh failed to collectively commit to scaling-up adaptation funds.
In the next two weeks in Bangkok, delegates will try to cut down and clarify a draft of the text that will lay the groundwork for Copenhagen. Further talks are expected on increasing financing for adaptation and mitigation, designing a legal framework and architecture for developing countries to act within and reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries.
In opening of the talks this morning, Executive Secretary of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Yvo de Boer warned that time to tackle key issues for a global agreement in December is limited. “Time is not just pressing, it has almost run out,” he explained, “But in two weeks, real progress can be made towards the goals that world leaders have set for the negotiations, to break deadlocks, and to cooperate toward concrete progress. As many leaders have said, ‘There is no plan B.’ And if we do not realize plan A, the future will hold us to account for it.”
