UN conference on climate change achieved modest results

At the last minute of the 11/12 supplementary meeting, more than 190 delegates attending the Durban (South Africa) international conference finally agreed on a new legally binding agreement.

Delegates approved a roadmap to reach an agreement to reduce global warming, after 14 days of meetings and 2 white nights to negotiate.

Under the agreement, industrialized countries will have to comply with the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 for at least another five years after the decree expires next year.

This agreement came into effect in 2020. This is the next step of the Kyoto protocol that was adopted in 1997 and came into effect in 2005.

The conference took longer than the schedule to 36 hours.

This is a strong signal from Durban for countries around the world to commit to limiting greenhouse gas emissions.

From now to 2015, 194 countries attending the conference will have to set up legal bases to apply to all countries, as well as devise tools to enable verification of each country's implementation of commitments. .

The goal is still to limit the temperature on Earth to not increase by more than 2 degrees Celsius, although so far, this is only a purely theoretical ambition because scientists explain that the world has only reduced. 60% of the emissions required to achieve the target set for 2020.

In fact, the agreement reached early today is a statement of intent but has a rather significant level, due to the participation of five countries, China, the US, India, Russia or Japan, as countries that emit 50% of CO ₂ have a greenhouse effect and before that, these 5 countries did not want to be bound.

But at Durban, things have changed. The years to come will be decisive in determining the ambitions of each nation in the fight against climate change.

The UN Climate Change Conference in Durban ended with an agreement on a package of solutions that the conference president rated as 'balanced'.

However, from the point of view of environmental protection organizations, the achievement at Durban was much lower than expected.

Negotiations lasted 36 hours more than expected. The cause of this prolonged discussion is disagreement between India and the European Union on the words in the written agreement on a 'roadmap' for emissions reductions.

India does not want to state that this roadmap is legally binding. However, in the end, representatives of the countries agreed that this agreement should have 'legal power'.

The roadmap for emission reduction is proposed by the European Union, the Union of Small Island States and the group of least developed countries.