Climate Change Minister Penny Wong has expressed her disappointment with the UN climate conference after landing in Copenhagen to find a split within the developing nations bloc prompted by a bold stand by the tiny Pacific nation of Tuvalu.
Speaking after landing in the Danish capital overnight, Senator Wong said it had been a difficult start to a complex negotiation process, reflecting three days of hardening divisions between rich and poor, and poor and dirt-poor.
"Some of the language that has been reported is disappointing, some of it's unhelpful," Senator Wong said.
"If we are going to make this work we have to move away from blame-shifting and finger-pointing. What we have to work towards is unprecedented levels of cooperation, because if we don't get those we won't get the agreement the world needs."
Debate in a major stream of the convention earlier reached a standstill due to a David and Goliath brawl between Tuvalu and a handful of much larger developing countries, including China and India and several oil-reliant Middle-Eastern nations.
Tuvalu wanted to open a high-level meeting to discuss the legal structure of a Copenhagen Protocol. Under its ambitious proposal, global warming would be limited to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrialised levels based on scientific advice that anything more would lead to it being swamped by rising seas.
The larger developing countries resisted, possibly because they object to being asked to take commitments under a treaty before wealthy nations make deep cuts, possibly just because they object to being asked to make internationally binding targets under any circumstances.
Tuvalu argues both rich and major developing nations must act if it is to survive, and says the majority goal of a limiting warming to two degrees would guarantee it had no future. Discussion in the stream was postponed, with consultations between negotiators expected to continue into the night.
Tuvalu's chief negotiator, Australian academic Ian Fry, said his country could accept nothing less than a full discussion of its proposal for a new legal protocol that would result in two treaties - one covering the rich industrialised nations bound by the Kyoto and another taking in everyone else.
"My Prime Minister and many other heads of state have the clear intention of coming to Copenhagen to sign on to a legally binding deal," Fry said. "Tuvalu is one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change, and our future rests on the outcome of this meeting."
His call was backed by other small island states and some African countries including Sierra Leone and Senegal - a sign, environmentalists said, of a growing divide with the 45-year-old G77 developing world lobbying group. It led to a raucous protests in the convention centre atrium, with acticicisits
The Tuvalu stand-off came in the wake of the leaking of a draft agreement text prepared by the Danish Government in conjunction with a handful of world leaders including Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
Proposals in the draft included a goal of limiting warming to two degrees and emissions or climate policies for developed and developing nations, but did not specify targets for 2020.
The G77 compared the rich nations that support the Danish proposal with countries that appeased Nazi Germany before World War II.
"Many of them were willing to appease gross violations of human rights, but at the end of the day humanity prevailed," G77 chair and Sudanese delegate Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping said.
In a separate exchange, US special envoy Todd Stern hit back at criticism from China that the US was not doing enough to cut greenhouse-gas pollution by demanding it take on a binding commitment. He said China must be a "major player" in the push to cut global emissions.
"The country whose emissions is going up really rapidly is China," Mr Stern said. "You can't even think about solving this problem without China - you just have to do the math."
He said the US would not sign up to the current Kyoto Protocol. It was open to a different form of treaty, but he warned: "If you mean taking the Kyoto Protocol and putting a new title on top of it we are not going to do that either."
Seantor Wong said Copenhagen must lead to an "immediately operational agreement": a deal that leads to the rapid start of a green fund to help the poor and most vulnerable, emissions cuts and work towards deciding the legal structure of a new treaty.
She said failure of the talks would be "a very bad thing for all nations and a very bad thing for multilateralism."
Meanwhile, Australia, Britain, Norway and Mexico released a joint paper on how to finance the extraordinary cost of fighting climate change.
It included backing the potential of imposing emissions reduction schemes on international shipping and aviation and using the revenue to revenue for green funding to help the poorest nations. But the paper included no specifics about how much a fund, or funds, would cost.
The Age
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