Paris talks creep towards agreement in final week, but deal could be 'watered down'

A weak agreement remains the greatest danger for the Paris climate talks, with negotiators confident some kind of deal will be reached before next weekend despite little concrete progress and continued trenchant disagreements on most issues. The Paris summit is now entering its final week – when ministers and high level officials take over the negotiating lead under the French presidency. The final agreement will be a political trade-off over the issues that have been dividing negotiators – so the document that will be handed to the French on Saturday remains to the lay-observer a hopeless scramble of options in brackets, indicating disagreement. But the senior negotiators believe there will be a way through. US special envoy for climate change Todd Stern said “a high-ambition coalition” was emerging, which “includes many countries” but not all of the 195 countries in the talks. He said the United States was now “really focused on getting that kind of strong agreement that is not watered down and does not kind of go to a lowest-common denominator or a minimalist agreement.” And Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the UN convention on climate change, said the talks were “where we thought they could be”. One impasse in the talks so far is about whether the document should mention that the latest science says the world should be aiming to limit global warming at 1.5 degrees, with Saudi Arabia and India flatly refusing attempts to even “reference” a UN study saying a 1.5 degree target was safer than 2 degrees. There are also divisions over suggestions big developing countries should join rich countries to make financial contributions to help poor countries reduce their emissions and cope with the impacts of locked-in climate change. Stern told reporters some countries had “overread” the issue. He said it was about recognising what was already happening - China pledged US$3.1 billion in support to developing countries, when president Xi met president Obama at the White House - rather introducing any requirement he said. There is also intense disagreement over the agreement is worded in a way that would bind rich countries to specific continued investments, beyond the deal struck in Copenhagen for $100bn a year in public and private money to flow by 2020. (An OECD review said around $60bn was already committed, but poor countries dispute the calculations) But Stern said the US believed clear rules for monitoring and verifying where countries were meeting their greenhouse gas reduction targets “was an an enormously important part of this agreement, really one of the central parts of this agreement.” “When you think we have 184 targets put forward ... the transparency regime is the thing that will allow everyone to have trust that others are acting ... transparency is vital,” he said. Some countries, including China and India, have also raised concerns about the idea of five yearly reviews of countries’ targets – the mechanism that it is hoped will help increase their ambition to meet even the goal of containing global warming to 2 degrees. The final deal is likely to be a trade-off between the rich countries demands for monitoring and oversight of all countries’ efforts and the developing world’s need for financing. The French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, said he had appointed high level ambassadors to try to move things forward before negotiators hand over the text containing what agreement they have managed to achieve. China was widely blamed for the failure of the 2009 Copenhagen meeting, but in Paris Fabius said China had “so far played an extremely positive role.” This time Saudi Arabia is taking its traditional hard line stance and India is playing what one negotiator described as a “blocking role”.