News | Energy Efficiency

http://www.businessgreen.com/business-green/news/2268271/mexico-attempts-rescue-stricken

Frantic round of diplomacy aims to get developing countries back on board ahead of crucial Cancun summit.

Mexican officials are engaging in a bout of increasingly frantic global diplomacy as they attempt to save the upcoming UN climate change summit in Cancun from collapse.
Leading figures in the Mexican negotiating team have spent the past few weeks attempting to restore confidence in the negotiating process after the most recent round of talks in Bonn ended in an ill-tempered standoff between industrialised and developing countries.
Speaking in an interview with Reuters yesterday, Mexico's chief negotiator Fernando Tudela said the host nation accepted the Cancun summit would not deliver an international climate change treaty, but insisted a "spectacular breakthrough" was still possible.
Tudela said the Mexico summit would aim to deliver "a set of meaningful decisions" on issues such as climate financing and adaptation, while also engineering an end to the "regime standoff" that has marred past negotiations.
"We have a window of opportunity that is closing," he said. "What we want to do is rescue these negotiations."
Tudela's colleagues have been attempting to lay the groundwork for a breakthrough over the past few weeks by reaching out to those countries that have repeatedly blocked negotiations.
Speaking at an event in Stockholm last week, Mexico's climate ambassador Luis Alfonso de Alba told reporters that officials were actively courting those developing countries that have "felt excluded" from the negotiations.
"We have started since the beginning of the year to address those concerns," he said. "We are paying particular attention to those countries that felt their views were not significantly taken into account… We have a very clear understanding that this is a process that needs to have everybody involved, not only the major [greenhouse gas] emitters."
De Alba name-checked those nations frustrated by their exclusion from the Copenhagen summit, admitting that Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea, Pakistan, the Gulf states, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, Peru and Colombia all felt their views had been ignored.
He also revealed that Mexico was attempting to broker a deal with African countries to ensure they are better prepared for the next round of climate change talks.
Meanwhile, Patricia Espinosa, Mexico's minister for foreign affairs, who will chair the COP15 meeting in Cancun, this week travelled to India to meet with the country's influential environment minister Jairam Ramesh.
According to reports in the Hindustan Times, Espinosa told Ramesh that "an ambitious outcome at the global meet requires India's sustained political guidance and support."
The two countries' negotiating teams also discussed their respective positions ahead of the summit, particularly with regards to emission targets and technology transfer arrangements.
In related news, teams from Australia, Germany and Switzerland set off from Geneva yesterday on an around-the-world electric car race that will see the vehicles drop in on the Cancun summit in late November.
The so-called Zero Race is backed by the UN and IT giant Google and will see the teams cover 18,642 miles and pass through 150 cities before returning to Geneva in January.
Race organiser Louis Palmer said the competition would demonstrate that "we have solutions [to climate change], such as electric cars and renewable energy. "