United Nations kicks off new round of difficult climate talks in Bonn

New round of climate talks kicks off in Germany

BONN — A new round of climate negotiations kicked off in Germany on Monday with squabbling over money and procedural questions that some say could threaten progress at the two-week United Nations conference.

Climate activists from groups including Oxfam, Greenpeace, and WWF pressured industrial nations to live up to their promises of financial aid to poor countries as delegates from some 180 countries gathered in Bonn.

“The finance part has not been solved,” Greenpeace expert Wendel Trio told The Associated Press at the outset of the expert-level meeting about six months after a disappointing climate summit in Copenhagen that ended with a nonbinding accord promising emissions cuts and immediate financing for poor countries.

While industrial nations at Copenhagen promised $30 billions in aid 2010-2012 to help poorer nations start more environment friendly development programs and adapt to the worst consequences of climate change, non-governmental organizations say developing nations remain skeptical.

They wonder when the money will come through and whether it is additional money rather than funds that were already pledged for other purposes that are being relabeled as climate aid, Trio said.

Oxfam said it is becoming clear that rich nations want to hand out much of the money as loans instead of grants, thereby saddling developing nations with new debts for a problem largely caused by industrial countries.

“It’s like crashing your neighbor’s car and then offering a loan to cover the damages,” Oxfam’s Antonio Hill said in a statement.

The $30 billion dollar pledge is one of the few concrete results from the Copenhagen conference. The U.N. climate secretariat has said that fulfilling that promise would be important to build new trust between developed and developing nations.

The Bonn talks center on a new, rather sketchy text with possible elements of a global climate deal expected to be finalized in 2011.

The envisioned treaty’s main purpose is to drastically reduce the emissions of heat-capturing gases over the next decades. At the same time it is meant to set up a framework on how rich nations help poor countries deal with climate change, how technology is transferred, and how Earth’s forests can be saved, among other things — making it an extremely complex document.

For the time being, the finance issue could hold up progress on other elements of the treaty, Trio said.

“Once that is cleared, we can take a real step forward,” he said adding that “I am afraid that it is going to be difficult.”

The most important point of contention still is how much industrialized nations and large emerging powers like China, India or Brazil must contribute to reducing emissions worldwide.

Nations in Copenhagen agreed that global temperatures must not rise more than by 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) as compared to preindustrial levels.

Scientists say that means global emissions must at least be halved by 2050.

However, individual pledges from countries so far fall far short of reaching that goal.