Isra-Mart srl : Tension rises as Tianjin talks end in US-China acrimony

www.isra-mart.com

Isra-Mart SRL news:

The latest round of UN climate change talks drew to a close over the weekend with diplomats confident progress had been made on the vexed topic of climate financing, but frustrated by the increasingly fractious stand-off between the US and China.

Relations between the two superpowers hit a new low at the close of the week-long talks in the northern Chinese port city of Tianjin, with the US accusing China of undermining the existing Copenhagen Accord and one senior Chinese official likening the US stance to a mythical preening pig.

Su Wei, China's chief negotiator, told reporters that US criticism of China's failure to agree to binding emissions targets was similar to Zhubajie, a pig in a classic Chinese novel, that is said to spend its time preening itself in a mirror.

"It has no measures or actions to show for itself and instead it criticises China, which is actively taking measures and actions," Su said of the US, reiterating China's view that no deal will be possible until the US agrees to more ambitious emission reduction targets.

Jonathon Pershing, the lead US negotiator at the talks, adopted more diplomatic language, but was similarly uncompromising in his views on China's negotiating tactics over the past week, accusing it of reneging on the Copenhagen Accord by failing to agree to binding emissions targets backed by an international monitoring regime.

"These elements are at the heart of the deal and the lack of progress on them gives us concern," Pershing told reporters. "The danger we face now is that the essential balance that allowed progress to be made is in jeopardy."

The stand-off overshadowed the rest of the talks, despite the UN's insistence that some good progress had been made.

"This week has got us closer to a structured set of decisions that can be agreed in Cancun," said Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) told reporters. "I understand there is disappointment with the multilateral process, but this issue is not easy. This is the greatest societal and economic transformation that the world has ever seen."

Diplomats said there were positive signs in Tianjin that an agreement could be reached at the upcoming Cancun Summit on how to deliver $100bn of funding each year from 2020 to help developing nations cut emissions and cope with the impacts of climate change.

A spokesman for the British government team said the UK's negotiating team remained confident that the talks were "on course" to deliver a positive outcome from the Cancun Summit, adding that the Tianjin talks had "made progress on a number of issues, including the creation of an international green fund".

However, Pershing publicly rejected the UN's tactic of trying to deliver agreement on a number of areas at the Cancun Summit before addressing the controversial topic of emissions targets next year.

"We hear here that we should save the tough decisions for later, but that will not work," he told reporters. "It will not work to cherry-pick some issues and not find a balance that will move us forward."

There were also reports that the negotiations on forestry protection, which had been hailed as an area where agreement may be possible, had stalled following opposition from Saudi Arabia and Papua New Guinea.

Peg Putts of the Wilderness Society told The Guardian that any hope that the so-called Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD) scheme could be finalised in Cancun was receding fast.

"This was supposed to have been a confidence-building exercise, but discussions this week have been shatteringly awful," she said.