Informal world climate talks in Bonn in August

Tue Jul 21, 2009 3:09pm EDT

* "Horribly complicated" document needs simplifying

* Aim is to craft document for December Copenhagen talks

By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent

WASHINGTON, July 21 (Reuters) - World climate negotiators will gather in Bonn next month to edit an "indigestible" set of proposals into a manageable document for international consideration, the head of a key U.N. panel said on Tuesday.

The August 10-14 meeting will be the first in a series aimed at reaching a new worldwide agreement to combat climate change in Copenhagen in December, said Michael Zammit Cutajar, who chairs a working group of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate change.

The Bonn gathering was added to an already crowded schedule of meetings around the world ahead of the Copenhagen summit.

"The juicy details will really start to come forward in the last quarter of this year," Zammit Cutajar told reporters.

The meetings in Bonn are supposed to be informal, aimed at guiding negotiators through the ideas contained in an unwieldy 200-page paper, he said.

"The document itself is horribly complicated ... It's indigestible, it's not meant to be read from top to bottom," he said. Negotiators were identifying issues so discussions could proceed in a more focused way.

Zammit Cutajar and his committee crafted a 50-page paper that was considered at a meeting in June in Bonn. It ballooned to 200 pages with contributions from various delegations.

The aim is to agree a treaty in December that would succeed the carbon-capping Kyoto Protocol, which runs out in 2012. The United States, alone among major industrialized nations, never ratified the Kyoto pact.

Earlier talks on a Copenhagen accord made some progress but the cuts proposed by industrialized nations have disappointed developing countries.

These global negotiations are taking place as the United States considers a carbon-capping law that was narrowly approved by the House of Representatives and is expected to be debated in the Senate starting in September.

This legislation aims to cut carbon dioxide emissions from 2005 levels by 17 percent by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050.

U.S. participation is considered essential to any global climate agreement, and Zammit Cutajar was encouraged by the U.S. long-term ambition to reduce carbon emissions.

The United States has "already started to bring ... the sense that it's serious, that it's going places and that it has a vision up to 2050," Zammit Cutajar said.

He said Senate passage of the bill would inject new momentum into the Copenhagen talks.

(Editing by Alan Elsner)








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