Climate change text ‘unmanageable’

MAJURO – The Marshall Islands foreign minister says political leaders working on a new United Nations deal to tackle climate change need a negotiating text that is shorter and more manageable.

Tony de Brum’s comments come after informal talks in France ahead of the major COP21 conference in Paris.

De Brum says the document must be something people can understand, and be able to work with and negotiate from.

Reuters reports that the current version of the draft text has a bewildering 85-page list of options, incorporating the demands of the nearly 200 nations participating in the process.

At the last round of formal talks in June, negotiators slimmed the document by only a few pages and tasked the co-chairs with preparing a new version, to be published this week.

The leader of the climate diplomacy programme at London-based consultancy E3G, Liz Gallagher, said the co-chairs can’t cut large swathes of the text because they do not have a mandate.

But she says they can set it out more clearly.