Slow progress since Earth Summit 20 years ago

PARIS: Twenty years after the Earth Summit in Rio pledged to save the environment for future generations, observers and policy makers agree swifter action is required to avert climate catastrophe.

But even as new warnings were issued this week of impending disaster, more severe droughts, disease spread and land-effacing sea level rises, climate negotiators gathered in Bonn continued to bicker over procedure.

"Let's consider climate change like you are in a car trying to stop before reaching a ledge. We are applying the brakes but we are still far away from decelerating enough not to fall from the ledge," Wael Hmaidan, director of activist group Climate Action Network, told AFP on the sidelines of the talks.

Climate researchers said the planet could warm by more than 3.5 degrees Celsius (6.3 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100 if countries do not raise their game. The UN's target is a 2 C (3.6 degree Fahrenheit) limit on warming from pre-industrial levels for manageable climate change.

Paul Hare from German policy research group Climate Analytics said the gap between countries' promised interventions and the reality was "getting bigger."

And the International Energy Agency said CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion reached a new high last year, providing "further evidence that the door to a 2 deg C trajectory is about to close."

The Earth Summit had yielded the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which in turn led to the Kyoto Protocol binding 37 rich nations to curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

"I would say that the climate negotiations at their twentieth anniversary are definitely moving in the right direction, but not at the speed and not at the scale" required, UN climate chief Christiana Figueres said in Bonn.

Scientists who monitor progress under the name Climate Action Tracker (CAT) say warming of 3.5 deg C could cause many plant and animal species to die out, deserts to expand and agricultural production to plummet.

They say the scenario can be avoided if governments raise their commitments considerably, and fast, cutting fossil fuel subsidies and boosting renewable energy production.

Fast-growing economies like China and India, fearing emission cuts may slow their development engines, insist the developed world, which polluted more for longer, should bear a greater mitigation burden.