Slow progress as climate talks head into final day

Environment ministers from around the world faced mounting time pressure on Thursday to shape a blueprint for a global pact on climate change with groundbreaking carbon curbs at its core.

There are concerns over an unwieldy draft text, intended to guide negotiations that by December 2015 must forge the most ambitious environmental accord in history.

There was also a revival of a years-old dispute over which countries should do more to tackle carbon emissions driving dangerous climate change.

"It is clear that progress over the last 10 days or so has been too slow, the text has grown instead of being streamlined," said European Climate Commissioner Miguel Arias Canete.

He told a round table on Wednesday that compromise "will take courage and it will mean countries moving to the edge of their comfort zones".

US climate envoy Todd Stern said, "We need to act with more dispatch."

The talks - the annual forum of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change - are scheduled to end on Friday after a 12-day gathering in Lima.

Their goal is to clear the way for a deal in Paris to slow the juggernaut of climate change by limiting global warming to 2 C over preindustrial levels.

At its heart would be a roster of voluntary national pledges on Earth-warming greenhouse-gas emissions created by burning coal, oil and gas. But countries remain far apart.

This casts a shadow over the prospects for next year, when pledges are put on the table ahead of the Paris showdown.

India led a chorus of developing countries on Wednesday as it defended a division of responsibilities enshrined in the UNFCCC at its birth 22 years ago.

"The new agreement has to be in full accordance with all, I repeat all, the principles and provisions of the framework convention," warned Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar.

(China Daily 12/12/2014 page12)