Skip Page Banner  
About This Blog
The climate.bna.com blog expands on BNA’s expertise in covering climate change and clean energy issues by offering a fresh take on legal, regulatory, and policy developments in the United States and around the world. Bloggers will offer commentary on news and trends reported by BNA; up-to-the-minute insights from the scene of international negotiations, like those sponsored by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change; and discussion of important but less well-known climate and energy issues.  
 
If you enjoy the blog, we invite you to visit climate.bna.com, BNA's free online climate news source. Climate.bna.com provides free access to headlines and highlights from BNA's subscription news service, the World Climate Change Report. We also invite you to join the discussion and post your comments to our blog posts. Please note that comments submitted to the blog will be held for review by the editors before being posted live on the site.
Blogroll
Climate
BLOG

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Rich-Poor Stalemate in Bangkok Continues; Delegates Say Cancun Progress at Risk

by Eric J. Lyman

RSS

 Tensions between rich and poor countries remained high at United Nations-sponsored climate change talks in Bangkok on Thursday, the penultimate day, with some delegates telling BNA they feared some of the achievements from the 16th Conference of the Parties in Cancun could start to unwind.

The Bangkok negotiations, which began Sunday, are the first major U.N. climate meeting since the close of the Cancun summit Dec. 11.

In Bangkok, rich countries have said that the 2011 agenda taking shape does not reflect the consensus from Cancun. Poor countries protest that rich countries are doing too little to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and to fund adaptation initiatives in poor countries.

“The expectation after Cancun was that we would build on the conclusions reached there,” Oleg Shamanov, a Russian delegate in Bangkok, said in a telephone interview. “But now certain items we agreed to in Mexico are coming up again for review and we are becoming bogged down in technical and procedural issues.”

Peter Wittoeck, head of the climate change section within Belgium’s Federal Environment Administration, agreed: “There is a real danger that what was accomplished in Cancun could be lost,” he said.

But Lamumba Di-Aping, a Sudan delegate and one of the heads of the Group of 77 developing nations, said the process was losing its “integrity” and steps had to be taken to prevent that. “I believe we are doing very important work” by calling for more action from wealthy nations, he said.
Subscription RequiredAll BNA publications are subscription-based and require an account. If you are a subscriber to the BNA publication and signed-in, you will automatically have access to the story. If you are not a subscriber, you will need to sign-up for a trial subscription.

You must Sign In or Register to post a comment.

Comments (0)