Crunch climate talks off to halting start

Home-stretch negotiations for a 195-nation climate rescue pact got off to a halting start today with developing countries protesting that several of their key demands were being sidelined.
In the last round of official talks before a year-end Paris conference tasked with sealing the deal, 130-plus developing nations demanded to reinsert core suggestions on fairness and finance it said had been dropped from a streamlined draft text.
The new blueprint "is extremely unbalanced and lopsided," South Africa's climate envoy Nozipho Mxakato-Diseko told an opening session on behalf of the so-called G77 group of developing nations.
As it stands, the document "jeopardises the interests and positions of developing countries," she added.

Developing nations are particularly concerned about what they describe as vague wording on promised financial aid for their transition to low carbon-emitting economies.
Money should also go in equal measure, they say, to shore up defences against global warming impacts that can no longer be avoided, such as storms and sea-level rise.

Separately, vulnerable countries want assurances on payouts for "losses and damage" that will occur in spite of these adaptation measures.
The five-day huddle in Bonn offers the last chance for rank-and-file negotiators to barter on the wording of the pact meant to crown more than two decades of fractious negotiations.

The draft that emerges will be taken over by ministers and heads of state for adoption at a November 30-December 11 UN conference in the French capital.
Since the last round of negotiations in September, the joint chairmen of the climate forum have whittled the draft down from 80 pages to 20.
But many say they have gone too far.
And on Monday, developing nations insisted that deleted passages be restored before line-by-line text bartering can begin.
"We demand that the text be balanced for negotiations to commence," said Gurdial Singh Nijar, a spokesman for the Like-Minded Developing Countries (LMDC) group, which includes major carbon emitters China and India and falls within the G77.

The new draft "completely ignored the submissions of G77 on finance," Nijar told AFP.
Developing countries want the agreement to include wording on USD 100 billion (88 billion euros) in annual climate finance the developed world had promised to mobilise by 2020.