Nations Still Worlds Apart At Crunch UN Climate Summit

Nations at UN climate talks were haggling Friday over the world's plan to avert disaster as host Poland dumped a draft decision text on delegates just hours before the summit was due to end.

Katowice, Poland, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 14th Dec, 2018 ) :Nations at UN climate talks were haggling Friday over the world's plan to avert disaster as host Poland dumped a draft decision text on delegates just hours before the summit was due to end.

Negotiators told AFP that delegates from nearly 200 nations were still far apart on several crunch issues, from how the future fight against climate change is funded, to the levels of help given to countries already experiencing its effects.

Ministers at the COP24 talks must agree on a common rule book to make good on promises made by countries in the landmark 2015 Paris accord, which vowed to limit global temperature rises to "well below" two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

But with the starkest warnings yet from scientists highlighting the need to drastically slash fossil fuel emissions within the coming decades in order to meet the safer cap of 1.5C warming, delegates were urged to act now or condemn at-risk nations to disaster.

One negotiator told AFP there were "several areas of concern" surrounding the draft decision text released overnight by Poland.

A major sticking point remains finance.

Developing nations say they cannot afford to make their economies greener without reliable, transparent funding from richer nations.

In the draft text there was no resolution on the key issue of finance, and developed nations, responsible for the lion's share of historic greenhouse gas emissions, were accused of seeking to shirk funding promises made in Paris.

"We are putting pressure on the (global) north to pay the cost," Costa Rica's environment minister Carlos Manuel Rodriguez told reporters.

Harjeet Singh, global climate lead at ActionAid, said rich countries were "playing a cruel joke" on developing nations.

As it stands, "there is no obligation on their part on finance, both in terms of how much money they are going to provide and how to count that money," he said.

The draft text gave short shrift to another red-line issue for poor countries exposed to the ravages brought on by global warming: so-called "loss and damage".

Cutting greenhouse gas emissions and helping nations prepare for a climate-addled future have long been the twin pillars of the UN climate forum.