The major developing countries like India and China, in turn, have refused to agree to binding targets altogether and are leery of demands that any of their commitments be monitored and verified as part of any agreement.
“Time is not just pressing. It has almost run out,’’ UN climate chief Yvo de Boer said, with a clock nearby showing there were 70 days until world leaders are scheduled to meet in Copenhagen to finalize a pact.
“As many leaders have said, there is no plan B,’’ he continued. “If we don’t realize Plan A, the future will hold us to account for it.’’
Some environmentalists tried to raise the sense of urgency by pointing to the weekend tropical storm that set off the region’s worst flooding in more than 40 years in the Philippines and left 140 dead.
It offered, they said, a glimpse into the kind of turbulent weather that could be unleashed by warming temperatures.
“We are asking the negotiators to look outside these walls. They should realize that it is the people’s lives at stake,’’ said Dinah Fuentesfina, a Philippine activist from the Global Campaign for Climate Action Asia.
The need for a deal was also driven home by a UN report last week that showed climate-related events such as the melting of glaciers and polar ice sheets and the increasing acidification of the oceans were happening much faster than scientists had predicted even two years ago.
The two weeks of UN climate talks in the Thai capital, the second to last meeting before Copenhagen, have drawn some 1,500 delegates from 180 countries who are tasked with boiling down an unwieldy, 200-page draft agreement to around 30 pages that will be presented to ministers in Denmark.
Connie Hedegaard, the Danish minister for climate and energy whose country will host the talks in December, told delegates that the world was watching and urged them to build on the momentum that came out of last week’s UN climate summit where 100 world leaders pledged their support for an agreement.
