Very little progress has been made at COP 16 in Cancun, Mexico for the UN Conference on climate change, because developed nations have refused to soften their stands, Dr Seth Osafo, Legal Adviser to the African Group of Negotiators to the UNFCCC Negotiators, said on Sunday.
He told the Ghana News Agency at the end of week one of the Conference that, developed countries had deliberately refused to come up with the adequate numbers that were required to amend the AWG-KP.
"For a number of months now, we have been trying to get them to come out clearly with emission reduction target but they keep delaying," he said.
Dr Osafo noted that, within the AWG-KP the developed countries had maintained their pledge made at COP 15 in Copenhagen, which were inadequate to help developing countries to adapt to climate change.
"The commitment of US$30 billion to the developing world over the next three years, rising to US$100 billion per year by 2020, was woefully inadequate to take care of climate change and its related problems globally.
"To make matters worse, Japan early this week came out to say that they will not be party to the second commitment period of the AWG-KP and this a big blow to the conference and appears to have dumping hopes of the developing countries," he said.
Under the Bali Action Plan (BAP) of the AWG-KP, he said, there was no particular area that progress had been made at the Conference.
The Bali Action Plan is an international strategy that talks about the support in the area of climate change financing, adaptation and mitigation actions into sectoral and national programmes, to the adv
He said in spite of the many discussions held so far for the past one week, things were not really moving on smoothly.
Dr Osafo said the two ad hoc Working Groups on Long-range Cooperative Action (AWG-LCA) and Ad hoc working group on the Kyoto Protocol for further commitment on the Annex one parties (AWG-KP), had been working rigorously yet, there had not been any progress.
AWG-KP and AWG-LCA are groups from different countries working on various components of the UNFCCC convention.
Annex one Parties talks about the further commitment of the developed
He, however, expressed the hope that a meaningful agreement would be reached once the ministerial section starts at the second week of the conference, adding that failure would be a big blow to the multinational negotiations.