Durban climate change conference continues, outcome still uncertain

With the UN Climate Change Conference in South Africa's Durban stepping into its fifth day Friday, little consensus has been reached on legally-binding carbon emissions cuts -- instead, new disagreements have emerged, making the outcome of the conference all the more uncertain. "It's safe to say that expectations are low for this conference of parties," Robert Orr, Assistant UN Secretary-general for policy coordination and strategic planning, told reporters Thursday afternoon at the UN headquarters in New York. Ideally, negotiations in Durban will produce an heir to the Kyoto Protocol, but that is getting increasingly unlikely given the intransigence of many developed countries. "The UN Secretary-General (Ban Ki-moon) wants to see progress towards a comprehensive binding climate change agreement, but we know that agreement is not going to happen in Durban," Orr said. "At this point, no one is calling for that. There's a lot of hard spade work that has to be done first," he said. Instead, Orr said, the United Nations' primary directive at the Durban conference will be to raise funds for both short- and long-term investment in alternative energy sources and green technology. However, as the United Nations has transferred its efforts to the Green Climate Fund (GCF), the long-term investment fund, negotiators are now hotly debating the issue. On Thursday, the GCF, which requires developed countries to provide 100 billion U.S. dollars to poorer countries by 2020 to help them cut carbon emissions and adapt to climate change, came under renewed scrutiny. The United States, the world's largest economy, reiterated its rejection at the talks, citing concerns about how the money would be raised. It wants more involvement of private businesses in the fund and said developing countries should also finance the fund. Saudi Arabia, one of the world's largest oil exporters, also expressed its reluctance, as it would need to compensate its loss of oil revenues if the world installed measures to reduce oil consumption. Moreover, reservation from some Latin American countries made the case more complex. In Wednesday's debate, these countries said they felt "deepest alarm" that the fund would lead the world on a path "diametrically opposed" to the principles of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. However, the majority of countries backed the fund and wanted it to become operational as soon as possible. Tomasz Chruszczow, European Union chief climate negotiator, said Wednesday that the GCF board must start working "as early as 2012." "In the context of a satisfactory outcome on the green climate fund as well as the overall package from Durban, we want to see the board start as early as 2012," Chruszczow told journalists here. The Group of 77 (G77) plus China, which supports the GCF, worked hard to ensure the Durban talks would deliver a favorable decision on the fund, saying it was a "crucial element to the solution of global (climate change) problems." Chinese chief negotiator Su Wei said establishing the fund "is a benchmark for the success of the Durban conference." Pa Ousman Jarju, chairman of the Least-Developed Countries (LDC) bloc, said the 100 billion dollars are not enough to help developing countries properly deal with climate change. He said the LDC group calculates that between 500 and 600 billion dollars will be needed annually from 2020. For its part, the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), which includes some of the world's lowest-lying and most vulnerable countries, said it is not satisfied with some of the principles in the draft document, but that it should be adopted "without delay." As both donors and recipient countries continue to argue about how much control they will have over the money, the direction and the outcome of the climate conference are still far from being clear.