Nations Chart New Course Toward Climate Pact

By PATRICK MCGROARTY

DURBAN—Major industrial and emerging economies set a course to reduce greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade and beyond, even as poorer nations warned it wasn't enough to shield them from the worst potential impacts of climate change.

Following marathon negotiations that stretched past dawn on Sunday, two days after the conference's scheduled conclusion, delegates from almost 200 countries agreed to draft a new international emissions treaty by 2015.


Under the agreement, most industrial nations currently bound to reduce emissions under the so-called Kyoto Protocol will extend their commitments beyond their current expiration in 2012. Many are European Union members already bound by EU law to make cuts that will satisfy the Kyoto requirements. Even though Russia, Canada and Japan earlier vowed not recommit to the Kyoto Protocol, they have signed onto the new agreement. The U.S., China and India—the three largest emitters of greenhouse gases—pledged to join them in the pact to take effect in 2020. Delegates will spend the next four years hammering out the specifics of their 2020 deal, starting at meetings next year in South Korea and Qatar.

Separately, envoys agreed to establish a fund to guide the flow of much of what they hope will be $100 billion in annual pledges by 2020 to mitigate the impact of climate change in poor countries.

China and India nearly derailed the broader climate pact by refusing to accept a strict "legal instrument," to police those emissions cuts. Instead, the version of the agreement that emerged Sunday contained the phrase "legal force"—a broader term that is seen as offering governments more leeway to identify how to curb emissions.

The pact marks a small sliver of common ground among different nations committed to checking climate change. But taken together, the two weeks of meetings in Durban highlighted the monumental challenge of any future treaty passing political muster at home.

China and India have long argued it would be unfair to curb rapid development that is helping eradicate poverty to offset emissions that rich countries produced over decades without consequence.

"I'm wondering if there is an effort here to shift the burden of this entire climate change problem on countries who have not contributed to this entire issue," India's environment minister, Jayanthi Natarajan, said as she rejected an unqualified binding deal. "Please don't hold us hostage."

Meanwhile, the U.S. had said it wouldn't accept binding targets unless India and China were on board. The chief U.S. negotiator, Todd Stern, also interpreted the agreement as a strong collective obligation to cut emissions. As long as India and China sign up for emissions cuts that are "symmetrical" to those pledged by the U.S., Mr. Stern said he believed the final treaty stood a chance of passing in a Congress that has rejected climate legislation—including the Kyoto Protocol—in the past.

"If the agreement has those elements then we could get into the category of the just very hard rather than the impossible," Mr. Stern said.

Though they didn't block its passage, many smaller nations were bitterly disappointed by a deal they said wasn't sufficient to keep emissions low enough to prevent temperatures from rising more than an average of two degrees Celsius, a threshold above which scientists say the impact of climate change will become much more pronounced.

Venezuela's Claudia Salerno urged fellow negotiators to push for a more robust deal when they meet again next year. "This is a very bad agreement," she said.

But many saw the pact as the one compromise possible. Even vaguely defined "legal force" commits China and India to emissions cuts, according to Luiz Alberto Figueiredo of Brazil. "It's legally binding and indeed it's very strong," he said.

Two years ago, talks in Copenhagen also broke down when China refused to accept a legally binding deal delegates had hoped to have in place by 2013, after the Kyoto Protocol was set to expire.

The EU revived the quest for a legally binding deal by pushing the target date back to 2020. Ahead of the United Nations-led meeting in this tropical port city, EU officials said they would only extend their Kyoto commitments if a broader binding deal was on track.

But after nearly a week tense negotiations in Durban, the EU accepted the broader wording that India and China demanded. "We wanted more ambition--The EU strategy worked," said Connie Hedegaard, the EU's climate commissioner.

Write to Patrick McGroarty at patrick.mcgroarty@dowjones.com