U.N. climate deal said "daunting" as Bonn talks end

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

BONN (Reuters) - The world faces a daunting task to agree a new deal by the end of 2009 to slow climate change, the United Nations said on Friday as 170-country talks ended with recriminations about scant progress.

Developing nations at the June 2-13 meeting accused the rich of dragging their feet in setting new cuts of greenhouse gases and failing to offer enough ideas for sharing new technology or for aiding the poor to adapt to the impacts of climate change.

"The road ahead of us is daunting," Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, said of a U.N. timetable meant to end with a climate deal in Copenhagen in December 2009 to widen and toughen the existing Kyoto Protocol.

Still, he said there was progress in Bonn partly because nations had a better understanding of what should go into the hugely complex treaty meant to slow desertification, heatwaves, floods, rising seas and more powerful storms.

"It is crucial that the next stage of meetings produce concrete negotiating texts," he said. Bonn was the second session in a two-year push for a deal after starting in Bangkok in March. The next will be in Accra, Ghana, in August.

Others were more sceptical.

"It could well be said that we have been beating around the bush," said India's Chandrashekhar Dasgupta. He said there was a "deafening silence" from almost all rich nations on ways to make new cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions.

"The pace was slow and difficult," said Harald Dovland, a Norwegian official chairing a group looking at future cuts by the 37 rich nations who have agreed to cut emissions by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12 under the Protocol.