In an interview with Euractiv´s Arthur Neslen on 1 June, UNEP´s Executive Director Achim Steiner expressed fears of failure at this year´s international climate talks (COP17) in Durban, South Africa. Concerned by the slow pace of negotiations on the post-Kyoto period, Mr. Steiner stressed the urgency of reaching a global climate agreement by the end of the year...
“At this point, everyone should be extremely concerned about what we will walk away with from Durban”, Achim Steiner, UNEP’s executive director told EurActiv. Steiner warned that "without a global climate agreement, we will never be able to achieve the levels of emissions reductions that are needed" and added that "with every year that passes, the time window is getting narrower".

The first priority in Durban will be to reach agreement on a deal replacing the Kyoto Protocol´s first commitment period, which will end in 2012. However, chances of securing a post-Kyoto international agreement are still narrow, as the US have never ratified the Kyoto Protocol, China is currently excluded of it as a developing countries, and Japan, Russia and Canada have refused to commit to a post-Kyoto agreement, arguing that it would only cover about 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

As Euractiv reminds, both EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard and US´s climate negotiator Todd Stern have dismissed the chances of agreeing a legally binding climate deal in South Africa. Connie Hedegaard recently said that whatever the outcome of Durban will be, the EU would ensure that from 2013, “we will only have offsetting for the least developed countries, not for emerging economies like today”. “So there’s already a major transition in the pipeline”, she continued, “but that is one of the things that we will use to discuss with our partners in Durban: They want this system to continue. Okay. What will they give in return?”

While acknowledging that "incremental progress" on emissions reduction could be made even in the case of a failure to reach a post-Kyoto agreement, Achim Steiner said: “I think that the historians will one day write off the decade of 2010-2020 as one of the tragic moments of indecision, of an international community and a world economy that was perfectly capable of moving to another level of carbon emissions trajectories but didn’t choose to do so for what will then seem perhaps, completely extraneous reasons.”

Other big challenges for negotiators in Durban will be to agree on numbers and timetables for legally binding emissions cuts, on details of the $100 billion per year Green Climate Fund for climate adaptation and mitigation in developing countries, and on ways of categorising "developed" and "developing" countries for climate targets.

The 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the UN´s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will take place from 28 November to 9 December in Durban, South Africa.