Bonn Watch: Crunch Time Looms for Vital Post-Kyoto Climate Treaty

The latest round of UNFCCC climate talks kicked off this week in Bonn, Germany, with delegates from 182 countries in tow and texts of draft agreements to work with for the first time.

The urgency is palpable: The world now has less than six weeks of allotted negotiating time to turn 53 pages of rough draft into a meaningful global climate treaty in Copenhagen in December.

It could go either way.

Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat, called the text "a significant new step." Nations accepted it, but they did so only grudgingly, signaling problems ahead.

Specifically, the Obama administration said the document lets developing countries off the hook. China, India, Brazil and the G-77 group of developing states claimed it's not harsh enough on cuts in emissions by the rich, highlighting the nagging rift between wealthy and poor nations.

As it stands, the text is chock-full of fill-in-the-blanks and multiple choices. Most worryingly, all four of the political deal-breakers remain unsettled. They are:

1. By how much do industrialized nations intend to shrink their emissions by 2020?
2. What will developing nations do to limit the growth of their emissions?
3. What will be the system for delivering financial resources and clean energy technology to help developing countries with adaptation and mitigation?
4. What will be the new governance regime under a Copenhagen deal?

The first two historical sticking points are absolutely vital to success of a worthwhile deal.

The science on what to do is clear: Developed countries need to slash their emissions by 25-40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 to constrain global warming to 2 degrees Celsius.

The offers on the table simply "don't amount to enough," de Boer said.

The EU has agreed to a 20 percent emissions reduction below 1990 levels by 2020. Leaders have said they'll boost that to 30 percent if other industrialized countries follow suit. The United States' proposed ACES climate bill targets a 17 percent cut below 2005 levels by 2020. That would represent a goal of just 4 percent below 1990 levels, according to figures from the World Resources Institute – if (and it's a big if) the bill becomes law.

Already, Jonathan Pershing, the deputy special envoy for climate change, has warned in Bonn that the legislation may not even be completed by December, making it impossible for U.S. negotiators to present any kind of final number for the Copenhagen agreement.

"It might mean that you have a framework in place as opposed to absolute numbers. Those numbers may come a bit later," he said.

Meanwhile, China and other developing countries want the U.S. and other rich nations to commit now to slashing emissions by at least 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 – an extreme and politically unrealistic demand.

Could Japan help to bridge the gap? The nation will soon announce its domestic mid-term mitigation targets for 2020. It is said to be considering six options, ranging from a pathetic 4 percent rise in emissions to an ambitious 25 percent cut.

Said Michael Zammit Cutajar, chair of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action, during a press conference of the UNFCCC Executive Secretary:

"We're waiting with bated breath for a figure from Japan."

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