Egypt's environment minister takes part in COP 21

Environment Minister Khaled Fahmy took part in the two-day informal ministerial consultations to prepare for the 2015 Paris Climate Conference (COP 21), slated for December.

Fahmy participated in as the chairman of the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (AMCEN).

"We have less than three months before the Paris meeting," French Foreign Affairs Minister Laurent Fabius said as he opened Sunday's meeting.

"The success of Paris will be built ahead of time. We cannot expect some sort of miraculous solution to appear during the final hours of the Paris conference."

On Friday, a five-day round of official text-drafting talks closed in Bonn with negotiators expressing frustration at their own lagging progress.

The goal of the informal ministerial consultations, which bring together around 60 delegations including about 40 ministers, is to discuss the overall balance of the agreement, its level of ambition and the degree of differentiation that should be retained in order to take into account the situation and levels of development of the different UN member states.

Finance, technology transfers, money for climate adaptation and "loss and damage" are all on the agenda for the informal two-day Paris meeting.

The main purpose of COP 21 will be the conclusion of a new international climate agreement, applicable to all countries after 2020.