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Focus shifts to Doha as Bangkok concludes climate change talks - The latest round of the UN climate change talks ended Wednesday in Bangkok, Thailand, with some progress made but still with mixed feelings as to whether governments are showing the ambition and will needed to solve the climate crisis. "The reason why the climate crisis is unfolding so dramatically is because governments have let a massive gap grow between what climate science says needs to be done and what they are actually doing to reduce emissions," Greenpeace International charges.

"Only global cooperation can stop the climate crisis. The climate battle is one that no person can win on their own," Tove Maria Ryding, Greenpeace International Climate Policy Coordinator, said Wednesday in a statement released at the conclusion of the talks in Bangkok.
The one-week-long meeting in Bangkok comprised of three negotiating groups that met informally to advance their work ahead of the Doha UN Climate Change Conference, scheduled to take place in Qatar from 26 November to 7 December.
The Doha conference will need to decide on crucial issues, including how to bridge the wide gap between the emissions reductions called for by the science and current governments commitments.
Governments will also need to decide whether the Kyoto Protocol, the existing treaty under which industrialised countries commit to emissions cuts, should continue or end.
The first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol ends on 31 December, 2012.
Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), stated at the end of the talks that government negotiators at the Bangkok meeting had pushed forward key issues further than many had expected and raised the prospects for a next successful step in Doha.
'There are still some tough political decisions ahead, but we now have a positive momentum and a greater sense of convergence that will stimulate higher-level political discussions ahead of Doha and set a faster pace of work once this year's conference begins,' Figueres said in a statement Wednesday.
But Ryding said "in Doha there will be no excuses: governments will have all they need to take political action and prevent an international vacuum on climate commitments."
Ryding said for the Doha meeting to succeed, governments must put on their agenda the adoption of the Doha amendments to the Kyoto Protocol - a legally-binding agreement on a second commitment period applying from January 1, 2013; ensure that the meeting make concrete decisions to reduce the global temperature rise, including cutting out the excess emission allowances from the first Kyoto commitment period; and new climate action for countries that have no international pledges and countries which have submitted range-targets  to go the upper end of their range.
The conference must also adopt a plan to urgently bridge the remaining gap between the politics and the science and peak emissions by 2015; adopt a roadmap towards the legally binding global agreement by 2015 and fill the empty climate fund with medium term funding of minimum 15 billion per year starting January 1st 2013; as well as make a decision on the key sources of the 100 billion dollars per year promised from 2020 and onwards and specific funding be allocated for mitigation, adaptation and forest protection.
'The United States and its allies want the UN to 'be silent' on issues where they haven't yet reached agreement. To be clear that means they want the UN to be silent on solving climate change. The US is taking a wrecking ball to the climate convention and any hope of stopping run away climate catastrophe,' Meena Raman, negotiation expert at Third World Network, said Wednesday.
'There are substantive proposals on the table that go to the heart of addressing the climate crisis. They provide for agreeing to a shared vision and global goal for emission limits, to ensuring comparable efforts between countries prior to 2020, to ensuring that finance and technology is available for developing countries - on all of this the US and other rich industrialized countries are saying: 'we should be silent, it's too hard, too inconvenient, asks too much of big polluters'. Yet it is the millions of the world's poorest who will have to pay the price and are already paying.' Lidy Nacpil, Director of Jubilee South APMDD adds.
According to the UNFCCC secretariat, the working group in Bangkok tasked to look at the Kyoto Protocol produced an unofficial paper outlining the elements of a final decision as they might appear under these amendments, which involves the construction of a fine and detailed set of legal checks and balances, drilled down into the detail of what needs to be done to resolve differences of opinion over the length of the second commitment period and reach compromise.
The negotiating group, under the full UN Climate Change Convention whose work has also resulted in a set of international agreements that aim to limit the average global temperature rise to below 2 degrees Celsius (beyond which climate change becomes increasingly dangerous), reportedly made significant progress in Bangkok in a number of areas.
This includes plans for a new market-based and other possible mechanism, meant to boost international cooperation on climate action, the shape of the agreed international scientific Review from 2013, which is to be a reality check on the advance of the climate change threat, and also finance on REDD-plus, which is the international cooperative programme to preserve and enhance the world's forests.
The group identified points where they might need additional decisions in Doha in order to close successfully. This includes finance to support developing countries efforts to deal with climate change.
"Bangkok has been the process of peeling back the banana skin of the 'Durban agreement' and its clear the insides are very soft and squishy. Although the world understood Durban to confirm that here would be a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, and a set of ambitious decisions to enhance the implementation of the climate convention, this session suggests that this will not be, in any meaningful sense of the words.' Mohamed Adow, International Adviser on climate change at Christian Aid, said in a statement Wednesday.
Asad Rehman, Head of International Climate at Friends of the Earth EWNI, said, "the Kyoto Protocol that the European Union wants here is one that is not legal, but merely a 'political decision'. It would also not include a science-based determination of countries' targets. And the EU is now trying to negotiate an 'out' where it doesn't have to talk about what it's really going to do until 2016. It's a sham of what was agreed in Durban and it would be a suicide pill for the world to swallow this.'
Governments at the 2011 UNFCCC conference in Durban, South Africa, set specific objectives for their 2012 meeting scheduled to take place in Doha.