Climate negotiators agreed a pact on Sunday that would for the first time force all the biggest polluters to take action on greenhouse gas emissions, Reuters reported. The package of accords extended the Kyoto Protocol, the only global pact that enforces carbon cuts, agreed the format of a fund to help poor countries tackle climate change and mapped out a path to a legally binding agreement on emissions reductions. Agreement on the package was reached in the early hours of Sunday. "We came here with plan A, and we have concluded this meeting with plan A to save one planet for the future of our children and our grandchildren to come," said South African Foreign Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, who chaired the talks. "We have made history," she said. Delegates agreed to start work next year on a new legally binding treaty to cut greenhouse gases to be decided by 2015 and to come into force by 2020. Britain's Energy and Climate Secretary Chris Huhne said the result was "a great success for European diplomacy." "We've managed to bring the major emitters like the U.S., India and China into a roadmap which will secure an overarching global deal," he said. U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern said Washington was satisfied with the outcome: "We got the kind of symmetry that we had been focused on since the beginning of the Obama administration. This had all the elements that we were looking for." Yet U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres acknowledged the final wording on the legal form a future deal was ambiguous: "What that means has yet to be decided." A U.N. spokesman said the final texts might not all be publicly available for some days.
