Durban - Climate negotiators agreed a pact on Sunday that
would for the first time force all the biggest polluters to take action on
greenhouse gas emissions, but critics said the action plan was not aggressive
enough to slow the pace of global warming.
The package of accords extended the Kyoto Protocol, the only
global pact that enforces carbon cuts, agreed the format of a fund to help poor
countries tackle climate change and mapped out a path to a legally binding
agreement on emissions reductions.
But many small island states and developing nations at risk
of being swamped by rising sea levels and extreme weather said the deal marked
the lowest common denominator possible and lacked the ambition needed to ensure
their survival.
Agreement on the package, reached in the early hours of
Sunday, avoided a collapse of the talks and spared the blushes of host South
Africa, whose stewardship of the two weeks of often fractious negotiations came
under fire from rich and poor nations.
"We came here with plan A, and we have concluded this
meeting with plan A to save one planet for the future of our children and our
grandchildren to come," said South African Foreign Minister Maite
Nkoana-Mashabane, who chaired the talks.
"We have made history," she said, bringing the
hammer down on Durban conference, the longest in two decades of UN climate
negotiations.
Delegates agreed to start work next year on a new legally
binding treaty to cut greenhouse gases to be decided by 2015 and to come into
force by 2020.
The process for doing so, called the Durban Platform for
Enhanced Action, would "develop a new protocol, another legal instrument
or agreed outcome with legal force" that would be applicable under the UN
climate convention.
That phrasing, agreed at a last-ditch huddle in the
conference centre between the European Union, India, China and the United
States, was used by all parties to claim victory.
Britain's Energy and Climate Secretary Chris Huhne said the
result was "a great success for European diplomacy."
"We've managed to bring the major emitters like the US,
India and China into a roadmap which will secure an overarching global
deal," he said.
US climate envoy Todd Stern said Washington was satisfied
with the outcome: "We got the kind of symmetry that we had been focused on
since the beginning of the Obama administration. This had all the elements that
we were looking for."
Yet UN climate chief Christiana Figueres acknowledged the
final wording on the legal form a future deal was ambiguous: "What that means
has yet to be decided."
A UN spokesperson said the final texts might not all be
publicly available for some days.
Environmentalists said governments wasted valuable time by
focusing on a handful of specific words in the negotiating text, and failed to
raise emissions cuts to a level high enough to reduce global warming.
Sunday's deal follows years of failed attempts to impose
legally-binding, international cuts on emerging giants, such as China and
India, as well as rich nations like the United States.
The developed world had already accepted formal targets
under a first phase of the Kyoto Protocol, which runs out at the end of next
year, although Washington never ratified its commitment.
Sunday's deal extends Kyoto until the end of 2017, ensuring
there is no gap between commitment periods, but EU delegates said lawyers would
have to reconcile those dates with existing EU legislation.
Least-bad option
India's Environment Minister Jayanthi Natarajan, who gave an
impassioned speech to the conference denouncing what she said was unfair
pressure on Delhi to compromise, said her country had only reluctantly agreed
to the accord.
"We've had very intense discussions. We were not happy
with reopening the text but in the spirit of flexibility and accommodation
shown by all, we have shown our flexibility... we agree to adopt it," she
said.
Small island states in the frontline of climate change, said
they had gone along with a deal but only because a collapse of the talks was of
no help to their vulnerable nations.
"I would have wanted to get more, but at least we have
something to work with. All is not lost yet," said Selwin Hart, chief
negotiator on finance for the coalition of small states.
Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu, head of the Africa Group, added:
"It's a middle ground, we meet mid-way. Of course we are not completely
happy about the outcome, it lacks balance, but we believe it is starting to go
into the right direction."
UN reports released in the last month warned delays on a
global agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions will make it harder to keep
the average rise to within 2 degrees Celsius over the next century.
"It's certainly not the deal the planet needs - such a
deal would have delivered much greater ambition on both emissions reductions
and finance," said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
"Producing a new treaty by 2015 that is both ambitious
and fair will take a mix tough bargaining and a more collaborative spirit than
we saw in the Durban conference centre these past two weeks."