Delegates close to outlining outcome for Cancun: U.N. climate chief

Climate negotiators are "very close" to making a decision on "what shape the Cancun outcome is to be," as they completed the third round of talks here, the U.N. climate chief says.

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UNFCCC (the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), told Xinhua on Friday that the just-completed Bonn session saw some progress.

That came, Figueres said, as governments approached a set of decisions, that were "operational in nature and established the institutional arrangements for moving forward."

A revised climate text, drafted by the chair of the Ad-hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action (AWG-LCA) was fully discussed line by line during the meeting.

The pages of the text climbed from the original 17 to 34, Figueres said, because the parties reinserted national positions during their last opportunity to do so before the Cancun climate summit starts in late November.

Between the Bonn gathering and Cancun, an extra session of U.N. climate talks will be held in Tianjin, China, on Oct. 4-9. The session will be the fourth round of climate talks this year.

"In Tianjin, countries have to go back to the hard work of discussing on how to compromise among those national positions," Figueres said. "They have to switch the focus to the content of those separated decisions and begin to move closer to common positions."


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