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South Africa has evoked the injustices of apartheid to oppose the latest compromise plan on global warming as envoys from a round of UN talks began a week of meetings aimed at drafting a text of the next climate agreement.
“We are essentially deprived of civil rights and have to negotiate our way back into the process,” Nozipho Mxakato-Diseko of South Africa said on behalf of more than 130 developing nations and China. Speaking Monday at the start of the UN meeting in Bonn, Germany, the delegate said the current text “is extremely unbalanced and unbalanced to the extent that it puts the interests and positions of developing countries at risk”.
Envoys are grappling with how to deal with 20 pages of text published on 5 October by US envoy Daniel Reifsnyder and Algerian negotiator Ahmed Djoghlaf, appointed by the UN to bring together negotiators for the new agreement. The UN wants the text to be the basis of the eventual agreement, while the G77 and others are trying to make changes before accepting it.
The UN aims to seal the final agreement in Paris in December after spending a year collecting commitments from all nations on reducing greenhouse gases. The intention is for the eventual agreement to limit warming from the industrial revolution to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), with all countries striving to reduce fossil fuel emissions.
“Parties generally like the brevity, clarity and structure of the text, but your happiness generally stops there,” Reifsnyder told delegates. “All of you have deep concerns about the different parts of the text. This is universal. ”
Reifsnyder called on countries to propose “surgical insertions” of “indispensable” items they needed before accepting the text as a basis for discussion. The discussions then stalled in a two-hour procedural debate in which envoys discussed how to proceed with such insertions.
Mxakato-Diseko described the process of having to justify the new additions as like apartheid, when black South Africans were told to justify why they should have voted.
She was not alone in her objections. US negotiator Trigg Talley said: “This document contains many things that most parties cannot agree on.” European Union envoy Pete Betts described the document as “minimalist”, adding that “we were willing to use it not as a good starting point, but as a starting point”.
“You can’t have a two-wheeled bike with one of the wheels removed and then say ‘justify why you have to have that wheel’, because then we can’t move,” Malaysian delegate Gurdial Singh said.
© 2015 Bloomberg News
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