by Agence France-Presse.
TIANJIN—China on Friday warned that trust and confidence were being sapped from long-running U.N. talks aimed at forging a global deal on climate change, amid a grinding standoff with the United States.
The latest round of negotiations in the Chinese city of Tianjin are aimed at laying the foundations for a U.N. summit on global warming in Mexico next month, after world leaders failed to broker a binding deal in Copenhagen last year. But while delegates said some incremental progress had been made in Tianjin this week, others said much more action was needed.
Major players China and the United States have given no ground in their standoff.
“I want to emphasize no compromise ... on the interests of developing countries,” the Chinese foreign ministry’s special representative for climate change, Huang Huikang, told delegates ahead of Saturday’s final session. “We are losing trust and confidence.”
Huang had earlier repeated China’s long-held positions that the United States and other rich nations must commit to making bigger cuts in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that are blamed for climate change. He said they must also give money and transfer technology to developing countries to help them cut their emissions and adapt to climate change.
“Now the key is there is a lack of substantive progress on the developed countries’ side,” Huang told reporters.
The United States, meanwhile, has insisted this week that it will not provide climate funds unless the big developing countries such as China allow their emission-reduction efforts to be monitored and verified.
The same issues were crucial factors in the failure by world leaders to broker a binding deal on climate change in Copenhagen.
The Greenpeace international climate policy director, Wendel Trio, on Friday hit out at the continuing hardline stance from the major players in the talks, saying it was a major roadblock to substantive progress.
“We need to get out of this culture of confrontation,” Trio told reporters, “the culture where governments say: ‘We will only move forward if the others move first.’ That’s not what we want. We want all countries to move forward because of the planet, not because of what others are doing.”
Nevertheless, there were signs of progress in some areas that could form the basis for specific agreements at the summit in Cancun, Mexico. Delegates said one area of potential progress was developing a framework for a fund that would distribute money to poor nations to mitigate and cope with climate change.
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