The annual United Nations climate summit was extended an additional day to Saturday as talks remained gridlocked, BBC reported. The two-week talks, known as COP27, took place in Egypt and were supposed to conclude on Friday.
Now the gridlocked U.N. climate talks will head into overtime.
The talks were extended by a day in an effort to break the deadlock as nations tussle over funding for developing countries battered by weather disasters and ambition on curbing global warming.
Nations are deeply divided over cash to help poor countries cope with the impacts of climate change.
Wealthy and developing nations are struggling to find common ground on creating the fund, and on a host of other crucial issues, with only hours before the summit was scheduled to end in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, The Guardian reported.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, who chairs the COP27 talks, told delegates that the negotiations would spill into Saturday, a delay not unusual in such sprawling UN climate talks.
“I remain concerned at the number of outstanding issues,” he said.
The Egyptian hosts are trying to broker an agreement among almost 200 countries after two weeks of negotiations.
There’s a real sense of urgency in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh as negotiating teams try to conclude an agreement on a range of complex questions.
The Egyptian presidency has presented a draft document that sums up the positions of the different countries.
There are several major areas of disagreement. Loss and damage are one, Al Jazeera reported.
Rich countries have resisted a discussion around loss and damage for 30 years, fearing that since they played a major role in causing climate change, they will have to pay for it for centuries to come.
But the impacts of flooding in Pakistan, Nigeria, and elsewhere in recent years have tipped the balance. The issue of the losses and damages due to rising temperatures has finally made it onto the negotiating agenda.
Another big area of disagreement is on phasing out all fossil fuels. Richer countries wanted to phase out the use of the most polluting fossil fuel. Larger developing economies including India and China do not.
And the final massive issue is whether to keep the 1.5 degrees C mantra alive. A rise of 1.5C in the global temperature is viewed by scientists as the threshold to very dangerous levels of warming.
But there has been a considerable worry at COP27 that the commitment to the idea would be watered down, especially as India and China were concerned it was no longer scientifically feasible.
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