Awwal 23, 1432 H/April 27, 2011, SPA -- A new, legally binding global climate treaty was unlikely to be agreed upon at this year's UN climate change summit in South Africa, dpa quoted officials from the EU and United States as saying Wednesday. The existing Kyoto Protocol is set to expire in late 2012. "There was nobody in the room who said, 'We won't do a legal agreement' ... But it would be highly implausible to have an agreement like that done in Durban," Todd Stern, the US special envoy for climate change, said in Brussels following a closed-door meeting of officials from major world economies. "The urgency of the issue is not always reflected in the speed at which things are moving," EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard said. "It's not that things are not moving, but they're moving slowly." At the 2010 UN climate change summit in Cancun, Mexico, ministers had pushed for a final, comprehensive deal on a global climate treaty to be hashed out in Durban at the end of this year. But the agreement reached in Cancun set no timeline for agreeing to the new treaty and left open whether a future deal would be legally binding on all countries. Discussions over a second round of the Kyoto Protocol have been ongoing since 2005. Countries such as Russia and Japan have indicated that they are unlikely to join a new round of Kyoto commitments, preferring a system that would instead allow each country to set its own climate change agenda without any binding, international agreement. "If the major players are not on board, then it does not make sense," Isaac Valero, a spokesman for Hedegaard, said. One of those, the United States - which did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol - is not opposed to a binding agreement in theory, but doesn't think it is pressing. "There are different views about the degree of necessity or not of a legally binding binding agreement," Stern said. "Our view in the US is that it's not a necessary thing to happen right away. "But we have always been supportive of a legal agreement if it has the right elements to it."
