* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Instead of a quiet end to an otherwise uneventful two weeks in Bonn at the U.N. climate change talks, there were plenty of fireworks on the last day.
First the entire morning session in the plenary was taken up with countries condemning the vandalism of Saudi Arabia's name plate. Photos of the broken name plate lying in the toilet had been put up on the walls, in apparent protest against Saudi Arabia's refusal to allow into the negotiations a technical report demanded by the small island states about the scenario of a 1.5 degree Celsius rise in temperature.
The low lying small island states say that their only hope of survival is for temperatures to stay below 1.5 degrees by the end of the century.
An investigation has been ordered into the incident by the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change secretariat.
Then came the developing nations' indignant reaction to the text that was eventually put forward by the Chair of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long Term Co-operative Action (the LCA track that was formed in Bali) in which most of the developing countries' proposals had been removed. Instead, substantial new "transparency" provisions were added on the behalf of the developed countries.
The Kyoto Protocol negotiating track also stalled as Russia, supported by Japan, openly opposed references to a "second commitment period" of the Kyoto Protocol and to increasing "the level of ambition of Annex 1 countries" when it comes to mitigation.
END OF THE KYOTO PROTOCOL?
That would effectively mean the end of the Kyoto Protocol, the last legally binding means of ensuring that rich countries cut down their emissions.
"What happened today is really disappointing," said Martin Khor of the South Center, last Friday. "The text has become even more imbalanced towards developed-country interests. It leaves out many important points that the old text included. This affects the balance& It is a step backwards."
It now appears that the developed countries would much prefer the bottom-up "pledge-based" approach based on the controversial Copenhagen Accord that the U.S. brokered last December.
In the LCA text, there is no reference to the Kyoto Protocol as a benchmark for compatibility, reflecting the U.S.'s reluctance to negotiate targets of its own or to have them compared unfavourably with other countries.
The vice-chair of the LCA just happens to be American, so considerable pressure has been put on the chair from Zimbabwe.
"Yes the G-77 (bloc of developing countries) is dismayed by the new draft which excludes their ideas, but they are willing to come back in August for a more balanced text," Yvo de Boer, the outgoing U.N. climate chief, said in his last press conference.
The G-77 and China have not rejected the text and will get another opportunity to reform it at another round of climate change talks in Bonn in August. De Boer added: "The European Union is also not happy with the text. It has its shortcomings. But it is not the final document."
"It is like one step forward, two steps back," said a negotiator from the G-77 group of developing countries. "We had made such good progress in the last two weeks and today they have undone most of it by presenting such a one-sided text."
Rina Saeed Khan is a Lahore-based freelance journalist. She was in Bonn as a Climate Change Media Partnership
fellow. The CCMP is an initiative of the Panos Network, Internews and the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).
