Cancun: Facing another year without a global deal to curb climate change, the world`s
nations will spend the next two weeks debating how to mobilize money to cope with what`s coming - as temperatures climb, ice melts, seas rise and the climate that nurtured man shifts in unpredictable ways.
Beginning Monday, 15,000 government delegates, environmentalists, business leaders, journalists and others will gather in the meeting halls of this steamy Caribbean
resort for the annual conference of the 193-nation UN climate treaty.
The Republican takeover of the US House of Representatives and a recent historic shift in emissions - developing countries now produce more greenhouse gases than
the old industrial world - all but guarantee the standoff will drag on, at least for another year or two.
"The world is waiting for fruitful negotiations," Mexico`s environment secretary, Juan Rafael Elvira Quesada, told a news agency. "What we want to have is really some action, not just talking."
But what UN officials and others foresee here is "incremental progress," not an overarching deal, in two weeks of negotiation ending with three days of high-level bargaining among the world`s environment ministers.
Hoping to revive momentum in the talks, delegates look for decisions leading to better terms for developing nations to obtain patented "green" technology from advanced countries, and toward a system for compensating poorer nations for protecting their forests.
PTI
