New Zealand will seek a "balanced package" on climate change, International Climate Change Negotiations Minister Tim Groser says.Mr Groser is in Cancun, Mexico, for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change's annual conference.Af
New Zealand will seek a "balanced package" on climate change, International Climate Change Negotiations Minister Tim Groser says.
Mr Groser is in Cancun, Mexico, for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change's annual conference.
After an opening day largely dominated by ceremony, almost 200 countries showed little sign of compromise on past demands that have brought deadlock since last year's Copenhagen summit fell short of a binding UN climate treaty.
All sides stressed that Cancun has to come up with a "balanced package," a mantra that masked deep splits in strategy about how to curb greenhouse gas emissions and divide the responsibilities between rich and poor nations.
Mr Groser was singing from the same song sheet.
"New Zealand will seek a balanced package of decisions at Cancun towards an effective, legally-binding, global agreement on climate change, building on the political understandings in the Copenhagen Accord," he said in a statement.
"It is important that we demonstrate substantive progress at Cancun, and send a message that there is still strong political leadership of the international climate change negotiations."
Developing nations at the two-week meeting have repeated calls for the rich to give 1 percent of their gross domestic product in aid -- far above a deal from Copenhagen that they provide $100 billion a year starting in 2020.
The United States and the EU, by contrast, insisted that "balance" means stronger action by emerging nations like China and India to curb their soaring greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and to allow more oversight of their actions.
While in Cancun Mr Groser will be a facilitator in talks on mitigation and measurement, reporting and verification.
"In plain language the issue is to find agreed ways to measure individual countries' efforts to reduce their emissions, to allow an informed debate about how these efforts can be compared with each other and to enable countries to verify whether their commitments are indeed being met.
"Agreement on this point is central to any deal at Cancun."
The talks, which require unanimity to progress, are seeking a successor for the UN's 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which obliges almost 40 developed nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-2012.
The United States never joined Kyoto, believing it would cost US jobs and excluded developing nations.
A statement by the developing nations in the Group of 77 and China said that a balanced deal would have to involve an extension of Kyoto.
Failure to agree a modest package in Cancun would raise doubts about the future of Kyoto beyond 2012. Kyoto's mechanisms encourage a shift to renewable energies from fossil fuels and help guide carbon pricing.
