Time Running out for December Climate Pact

Anchor: About 180 nations are meeting for the third round of UN climate talks in Germany's Bonn to prepare for the climate change conference in Copenhagen.

Participants at the meeting have warned that time is running out to reach agreement on a hugely complex pact, due for completion at the end of the year.

CRI's reporter Zhang Cheng has more.

Reporter: The five-day Bonn meeting, which opened Monday, is focusing on a text that was drafted at the second round of the talks.

At the meeting, Ivo De Boer, head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said "time is running out."

"As you know, we have just 115 days left until Copenhagen, about five weeks of negotiating time. We have a very complicated text on the table and the challenge for this session is going to be to narrow that text down and really try and identify the core elements of the Copenhagen agreement."

The draft text, outlining options for tackling global warming, has swollen to about 200 pages from 50 just a few months ago.

The 200-page text outlines ideas such as ways to register curbs on greenhouse gas emissions by developing nations, how to help the poor adapt to climate change, and ways to protect forests.

The leader of the WWF global climate initiative, Kim Carstensen, hopes negotiators at this meeting will make concrete progress on the text.

"Politically, what I think is really important is to translate what was agreed at the G8 meeting at the major economies forum in terms of a minus eighty percent reduction in developed countries by 2050 and translating that into a negotiation text which is relevant in the treaty."

However, some developed countries have still not committed themselves to the new proposals, which has impeded the process of negotiation.

Yu Qingtai, the Chinese foreign ministry's climate change negotiator, says the international community should seek common ground while putting aside differences.

"From the perspective of the human being, the upcoming Copenhagen meeting is crucial and must be successful. If the world can't reach an effective agreement on this issue we will suffer the consequences, so we should pull out all the stops to make progress at this meeting."

The Copenhagen meeting in December aims to work out a new global pact on climate change to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

Zhang Cheng, CRI news.