MADRID-Countries remained deadlocked Saturday in talks over combating climate change as U.N. talks dragged on beyond the official deadline with no end in sight. Chile’s environment minister, Carolina Schmidt, who is chairing the two-week talks in Madrid, urged officials from almost 200 countries to recognize the “overall balance” of the latest draft agreements hammered out overnight.
“We must show the outside world that we deliver,” she said, as officials prepared to hunker down for further negotiations. But observers and environmental groups expressed outrage at the current proposals, saying they risked undoing or stalling on commitments made in the 2015 Paris climate accord.
“I’ve been attending these climate negotiations since they first started in 1991, but never have I seen the almost total disconnection we’ve seen here (...) in Madrid between what the science requires and the people of the world demand, and what the climate negotiators are delivering,” said Alden Meyer, a climate policy special at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Meyer said the current drafts didn’t reflect urgent warnings from scientists that greenhouse gas emissions need to fall sharply, and soon, in order to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. By most calculations, temperatures have already risen 1 degree Celsius since pre-industrial times and efforts so far put the world on course for a 3-4 degree Celsius rise by 2100, with potentially devastating consequences particularly for vulnerable developing countries. “The planet is on fire and our window of escape is getting harder and harder to reach the longer we fail to act,” Meyer said.
Growing concern about climate change has been reflected in mass protests staged around the world over the past year, often by young activists concerned about the future they and their children might face as the planet heats up.