Global Offset Experts: UN to hold an extra session of climate talks in Bangkok in April.

Feb. 1, 2011 - PRLog -- UN officials have said that 2011 is likely to see the start of a slowdown in the overall number of UN meetings about climate change after a flurry of talks since 2007 failed to deliver a treaty.

"The session is to be held in Bangkok from April 3 to 8," an UN official told Global Offset Experts during a recent video conference meeting. The Bangkok talks will involve senior government negotiators.

The meeting is an extra session above the existing schedule, which includes a June session to be held in Bonn, Germany and the annual UN climate conference to be attended by environment ministers in Durban, South Africa at the end of the year. Another session may also be added between the Bonn and Durban meetings.

At the 2010 climate conference in Cancun, Mexico, ministers agreed steps including a deal to set up a new fund to channel aid to developing nations as well as a goal of limiting the rise of global temperatures to less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6F) above pre-industrial times, as previously reported by Global Offset Experts.

UN officials say this year’s talks will attempt to fill in the details of many of the plans agreed to in 2010, including greenhouse gas emission cuts aimed at helping to prevent increasing flooding, heat waves, droughts and rising sea levels which have been predicted by scientists and the UN’s panel of climate experts.

The primary unsolved issue facing climate negotiators is finding a successor to the UN’s Kyoto Protocol, due to expire at the end of 2012, which obliges nearly 40 nations to significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.

A number of countries including Japan, Russia and Canada have indicated that they will not extend cuts beyond December 31, 2012, unless all major emitters, led by China and the U.S. agree to a binding pact. The US chose not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol saying that it would cost U.S. jobs and wrongly omitted binding goals for emerging nations.

Developing countries argue that richer nations, those most responsible for burning fossil fuels which emit greenhouse gasses, responsible for global warming, must extend the Kyoto while they agree to less stringent emission cuts.

In his recent State of the Union address, U.S. President Barack Obama promised measures to promote clean energy, but Global Offset Experts sources report, he did not once mention climate change.

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