Brady Dennis and Chico Harlan, Washington Post
MADRID — Global climate talks lurched to an end here Sunday with finger-pointing, accusations of failure and fresh doubts about the world’s collective resolve to slow the warming of the planet — at a moment when scientists say time is running out for humans to avert steadily worsening climate disasters.
After more than two weeks of negotiations, punctuated by raucous protests and constant reminders about the need to move faster, bleary-eyed negotiators barely mustered enthusiasm for the compromise they had patched together, while raising grievances about the many issues that remain unresolved.
At a gathering where the mantra “Time for Action” was plastered throughout the hallways and on the walls, the negotiators failed to achieve their primary goals. Central among them: convincing the world’s largest carbon-emitting countries to pledge to tackle climate change more aggressively beginning in 2020.
“We are not satisfied,” the chair of the meeting, Chilean Environment Minister Carolina Schmidt said. “The agreements reached by the parties are not enough.”
Delegates from nearly 200 nations wrestled for more than 40 hours past their planned deadline — making these the longest in the 25-year history of these talks — even as workers broke down parts of the sprawling conference hall, food vendors closed and all but the most essential negotiators went home.
Extreme climate change has arrived in America
As officials scrambled to finalize a complex set of rules to implement the 2015 Paris climate accord, a handful of larger-emitting countries squared off again and again against smaller, more vulnerable countries. In particular, negotiators came to loggerheads while crafting rules around a fair and transparent global carbon trading system, and pushed the issue to next year. Fights also dragged on about how to provide funding to poorer nations already coping with rising seas, crippling droughts and other consequences of climate change.AD
The painstaking pace of the talks stood in contrast to the mass demonstrations and vehement pleas from young activists, some of whom staged protests inside the conference hall and accused world leaders of neglecting the most significant challenge facing humanity.
“This is the biggest disconnect between this process and what’s going on in the real world that I’ve seen,” said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists, who has been attending climate talks since the early 1990s.
“You have the science crystal on where we need to go. You have the youth and others stepping up around the world in the streets pressing for action,” he said. “It’s like we’re in a sealed vacuum chamber in here, and no one is perceiving what is happening out there — what the science says and what people are demanding.”AD
Sunday’s outcome underscored how international divisions and a lack of momentum threaten the effort to limit the warming of the Earth to dangerous levels, only four years after the Paris agreement produced a moment of global solidarity.
“The can-do spirit that birthed the Paris Agreement feels like a distant memory today,” Helen Mountford, vice president for climate and economics at the World Resources Institute, said in a statement Sunday.
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Related news stories:
U.N. Climate Talks End With Big Polluters Blocking Stronger Action
COP25: Longest climate talks end with a compromise deal
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