UNFCCC executive secretary Yvo de Boer, pictured here in Copenhagen, has quit to pursue a career in the private sector.
Credit: AFP
It was cast as a chance to revamp the U.N. arena on climate change, to rebuild trust and foment new thinking after the backbiting and sterility of the Copenhagen Summit last December.
Instead, three days of talks in Bonn, Germany, under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at times resembled the movie Groundhog Day, where a grumpy sceptic is doomed to live the same events over and over again.
Almost as if the shock of Copenhagen had never happened, delegates squabbled afresh over the minutiae of the UNFCCC's work schedule, over which bits of draft text to use as a blueprint for negotiation and the fate of a document widely dismissed as a threadbare compromise.
"Old habits die hard," Greenpeace observed acidly. "Too many of the negotiators present chose to focus on divergence and problems."
"There's still strong disagreements about how to move this process forward ... to demonstrate that the UNFCCC can deliver in the end, because there is a lot of debate in the public about that right now," admitted EU negotiator Artur Runge-Metzer.
Developing nations barely masked their mistrust of rich countries, which many suspected of seeking to ditch the carbon-curbing Kyoto Protocol after 2012 and replace the benchmark treaty with a wishy-washy voluntary deal.
The United States and other rich countries, for their part, at times struggled to hold back exasperation at a consensus-driven negotiation format that, in their view, had dangerously slowed progress.
"Some delegates don't seem to have taken onboard what happened in Copenhagen and the need to swiftly gain concrete results," said French chief negotiator Paul Watkinson.
They lobbied for Copenhagen's one semi-success - a brief document cobbled together by a couple of dozen leaders to stave off a disaster - to be given life rather than cast into limbo.
Copenhagen was supposed to be the glittering culmination of a two-year haggle among 194 countries.
It was to have opened the way to a landmark treaty for reducing greenhouse gases and priming a financial pump that ultimately will provide hundreds of billions of dollars to climate-vulnerable poor countries. But the touted triumph was transformed into a near fiasco, redeemed only by the frantic drafting of the so-called Copenhagen Accord.
kyoto protocol lead the world to third world war
Copenhagen/kyoto protocal its expected to the first world countries to divert the issues from reduction of greenhouse gases to some kind of solution to the climate change. which ever issues copenhagen tackle will end into serius allegation, eather politically or religiusly its a matter of national security, no world leader want its people to supper econamically because of this kyoto protocal, cutting production means sucrifise to business world, no businesman gonna like it specialy polical leaders, they don't want to be blame by their constituent. if that so every nation will do some kind of preparation to protect their people agains disaster, but other nation will blame the other nation until the third world war clash.
Copenhagen was supposed to
Copenhagen was supposed to be the glittering culmination of a two-year haggle among 194 countries. But it barely succeeded to implement the plans.
(free press release)