Canada envoy sees draft climate treaty achievable

CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) - Countries struggling for a deal on combating climate change are likely to overcome divisions and agree on a draft treaty to serve as a basis for upcoming talks in Copenhagen, Canada's chief negotiator said.

Countries must winnow down a 199-page negotiating paper at a series of talks before the Copenhagen meeting in December. Key players, including UN Climate Change Secretariat head Yvo de Boer, have expressed fear that it may not happen given the slow pace of discussions to date.

"I believe we can do that," Michael Martin, Canada's chief negotiator and ambassador for climate change, said a meeting hosted this week by the International Institute for Sustainable Development. "To help us get there, there will be a lot of ministerial engagement between now and Copenhagen."

There had been optimism that countries could streamline the negotiating text at meeting in Bonn, Germany, in August, but longstanding divisions between developed and developing countries and other issues prevented that.

After a United Nations summit on climate change on Tuesday, meant to spur the talks among 190 countries, a total of three weeks of meetings in Bangkok and Barcelona remain before the Copenhagen talks.

Discussions leading up to Copenhagen have put rich and poor nations at odds over how to distribute cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.

Developing countries are pressing developed ones to contribute hundreds of billions of dollars annually to help them cope with rising temperatures.

Participation of the United States and China, which are responsible for up to 40 percent of the world's emissions, are seen as key to success in a treaty.

For Canada, it is important to harmonize its targets with the United States, said David Runnalls, chief executive of the IISD, a Canadian-based environmental think tank.

"I think the lesson that the Canadian government learned from Bush's decision not to go forward with Kyoto is that you can't get that far distant from the U.S.," Runnalls said, referring to former U.S. President George W. Bush.

"It's essentially a continental market, and one of the problems we had after Bush withdrew was that all Canadian industries started complaining they weren't going to be competitive anymore."

He said he was not concerned about the lack of progress to date in reaching a draft treaty.

"If you got a half a dozen key governments -- China, Brazil and South Africa, along with the U.S., Japan and the European Union, you could get an agreement. Everybody else might not like it, but they wouldn't kick and scream and yell," he said.

For its part, Canada has set a goal to cut emissions by 20 percent from 2006 levels by 2020. That is after failing to achieve a Kyoto commitment of reducing emissions 6 percent from 1990 levels by now.

(Reporting by Jeffrey Jones; Editing by Frank McGurty)