Concern over too many climate treaty drafts

Ahead of the key climate summit here, representatives of the G-77 group of developing nations and China spent two days in a conference room in Copenhagen, discussing their strategy for the meeting and speculating on possible outcomes and their position on specific issues.

One of the issues that has emerged among several members of the group, according to the Indian delegation, is the deep concern over several drafts of a potential agreement that are floating around including the BASIC (Brazil, South Korea, India, China) draft that has been recently circulated as well as the Danish proposal, which is yet to be fully disclosed.

These documents are outside the drafts being worked on by the working groups within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) called the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-Term Cooperative Action and the Ad Hoc Working Group on Kyoto Protocol that are charged with coming up with a text.

Several rounds of meetings under the UNFCCC banner have yielded around 15 negotiating papers and concerned parties believe at some point all will converge into one single text.

At the recent meetings, countries within G-77 stated that so many external texts and parallel process would not be manageable.

Most are in favour of talks being continued through a formal process under the UN framework without any attempt to bring a deal to these issues through an external process.