Climate change: UN makes high-risk attempt to break deadlock on talks
Source: The Guardian
Climate change: UN makes high-risk attempt to break deadlock on talks
Fiona Harvey, environment correspondent
The Guardian, Friday 20 September 2013 19.38 BST
The United Nations secretary general is to invite world leaders next week to an unprecedented summit on climate change, in the hope of breaking the long deadlock on global warming talks. The high-risk strategy will put heads of state and government together to talk about the issue for the first time since the Copenhagen summit in 2009 ended in scenes of farce and disarray.
Ban Ki-moon has decided he must convene the meeting because of the stalemate in the talks for the past four years, with international action dwindling even as greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise strongly, and scientific warnings over the consequences grow more strident.
He will tell world leaders next week that he expects them to attend crucial talks in 2014, ahead of a diplomatic push for a new global treaty on the climate, to culminate the following year. It is understood that he thinks one of the failures of the Copenhagen process was to bring in leaders only in the dying days of those negotiations, when diplomats had already failed to secure a deal.
By convening leaders a year before the crucial stage of the new round of global talks, he hopes to create an atmosphere in which leading nations such as the US, China and EU countries can agree the broad outlines of a new climate agreement, and then return to their officials and instruct them to hammer out the details.
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Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/sep/20/climate-change-un-talks