Copenhagen was a horrible meet,says de Boer

The failure of the much-hyped Copenhagen summit,has raised serious questions over UN process of negotiations.

While there has been a general frustration at the lack of progress in the climate talks,it is evident that the ongoing meetings in Bonn are struggling to address more pressing issue at hand that of restoring confidence back into the negotiating process.

The failure of the much-hyped Copenhagen summit in December last year not just pushed back hopes of a comprehensive global agreement on climate change,possibly,by several years,it also raised serious questions over UN process of negotiations that require every decision to be taken only by consensus. In addition,Copenhagen had led to lots of mistrust between the different countries,with secret and select meetings,surprise documents,accusations and counter-accusations,and use of pressure tactics seriously undermining the hopes of any meaningful agreement.

Copenhagen was a pretty horrible conference. It caused a major damage to the negotiating process, Yvo de Boer,the outgoing Executive Secretary of the UN climate body Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) said on Monday. For this reason,de Boer,who is exiting after overseeing the climate negotiations for four years,is not surprised that the Bonn talks so far have not been able to make even incremental advances.

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He feels there is an urgent need to inject trust back into the process first. And one way to do that,he says,is for the rich industrialised countries to deliver on a promise that they had made in Copenhagen that they would jointly provide $30 billion over the next three years to enable the worst-affected countries to fund efforts to adapt to effects of climate change.

Its been six months from Copenhagen and there is little clarity on how this money $10 billion every year from 2010 to 2012 would be raised or distributed. This year is about restoring the trust and that is why it is important that the $30 billion in fast-start funding starts flowing. That would be a motion of confidence in the process, he said.

A similar crisis of credibility is being faced by the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). A couple of errors in IPCCs 2007 report,revealed a few months ago,have led to accusations that science on climate change was not robust and that IPCC deliberately sexed up its findings to agree to pre-decided conclusions. Jean-Pascal van Ypersele,vice-chair of IPCC,on Tuesday said the panel was working doubly hard to restore public confidence in itself.

Mexico slams pessimistic comments

BONN: Expressing displeasure over attempts by some UN and EU officials to lower expectations from the next climate change meet in Cancun,Mexico on Tuesday said such pessimism was hampering the possibility of making progress in the talks.

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Such comments dont help the (negotiating) process. We need to be ambitious in our approach, Mexicos top climate change negotiator Luis Alfonso de Alba said. It is good to be pragmatic. But being realistic means making a serious analysis of what can be achieved,not saying that nothing was achievable.

Wary of a Copenhagen-like embarrassment,some senior climate leaders including Yvo de Boer,the outgoing UNFCCC chief,have over the past few weeks played down the possibility of a big breakthrough emerging at Cancun. ENS