News

A U.N. climate conference reached a hard-fought agreement on Sunday on a complex and far-reaching programme meant to set a new course for the global fight against climate change.

The 194-party conference agreed to start negotiations on a new accord that would put all countries under the same legal regime enforcing commitments to control greenhouse gases.

It would take effect by 2020 at the latest.

"Seeing no objections, it is so decided," said Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, South Africa's foreign minister and conference president.

The deal does not explicitly compel any nation to take on emissions targets, although most emerging economies have volunteered to curb the growth of their emissions.

Currently, only industrial countries have legally binding emissions targets under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

Those commitments expire next year, but they will be extended for at least another five years under the accord adopted on Sunday - a key demand by developing countries seeking to preserve the only existing treaty regulating carbon emissions.

The proposed Durban Platform offered answers to problems that have bedeviled global warming negotiations for years about sharing the responsibility for controlling carbon emissions and helping the world's poorest and most climate-vulnerable nations cope with changing forces of nature.

The United States was a reluctant supporter, concerned about agreeing to join an international climate system that likely would find much opposition in the US Congress.

"We just have effectively finished, there's details that still have to get done, but we effectively finished the negotiations and I think in the end it ended up quite well," said US climate envoy Todd Stern.

Stern admitted, however, that there was plenty that the US is not happy about.

Europeans were much more positive.

"We think we had the right strategy, we think that it worked, and the very good thing is that now all big economies, all parties will have to commit in the future in a legal way," said Connie Hedegaard, European Commissioner for Climate Action.

The deal also set up the bodies that will collect, govern and distribute tens of (b) billions of dollars a year for poor countries.

Other documents in the package lay out rules for monitoring and verifying emissions reductions, protecting forests, transferring clean technologies to developing countries and scores of technical issues.

"What we have done today is actually a great success for European diplomacy, we've managed to put this on the map and we've managed to bring the major emitters, like the United States and India and China, into a roadmap which will secure an over-arching global deal," said Chris Huhne, British Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change.

The deal's language left some analysts warning that the wording left huge loopholes for countries to avoid tying their emissions to legal constraints, and noted that there was no mention of penalties.

Environmentalists criticised the package - as did many developing countries in the debate - for failing to address what they called the most urgent issue, to move faster and deeper in cutting carbon emissions

"We are disappointed about the outcome," said Tasneem Essop from the World Wildlife Fund.

"What we expected here was urgent action to address climate change and certainly the biggest problem here was the lack of ambition in terms of immediate action to reduce carbon emissions. We've come out essentially with an empty shell," she added.

Scientists say that unless those emissions - chiefly carbon dioxide from power generation and industry - level out and reverse within a few years, the Earth will be set on a possibly irreversible path of rising temperatures that lead to ever greater climate catastrophes.