US President Barack Obama and other world leaders on Sunday supported delaying a legally binding climate pact until 2010 or even later, under a compromise deal for next month's Copenhagen summit.
"Given the time factor and the situation of individual countries we must, in the coming weeks, focus on what is possible and not let ourselves be distracted by what is not possible," Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen told the leaders.
"The Copenhagen Agreement should finally mandate continued legal negotiations and set a deadline for their conclusion," said the Copenhagen talks host, who flew into Singapore to lay out his proposal over breakfast at an Asia-Pacific summit.
Rasmussen said the December 7-18 talks should still agree key elements such as cuts in greenhouse gases for industrialised nations and funds to help developing nations. Copenhagen would also set a deadline for writing them into a legal text.
"We are not aiming to let anyone off the hook," Rasmussen said. Danish officials said Copenhagen wanted all developed countries including the United States to promise numbers for cuts in emissions in Copenhagen. The US Senate has not yet agreed carbon-capping legislation. The next major UN climate meeting is in Bonn in mid-2010.
"There was an assessment by the leaders that it was unrealistic to expect a full, internationally legally binding agreement to be negotiated between now and when Copenhagen starts in 22 days," senior US negotiator Michael Froman told reporters after the meeting, which was attended by leaders of the United States, China, Japan, Russia, Mexico, Australia and Indonesia. "We believe it is better to have something good than to have nothing at all," Chilean Foreign Minister Mariano Fernandez said.
Copenhagen was seen as the last chance for countries to agree on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol and put in place painful measures needed to fight a rise in temperatures that would bring more rising sea levels, floods and droughts. The aim of the summit is to set ambitious targets for cutting greenhouse gases, but also to raise funds to help poor countries tackle global warming.
However, negotiations have been bogged down, with developing nations accusing the rich world of failing to set themselves deep enough 2020 goals for curbing greenhouse gas emissions.
"Leaders ... were clear in their view that the current officials-led process is running into all sorts of difficulties, and therefore it is time for leaders, politically, to step in," Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd told reporters after the meeting with Rasmussen. It was not clear if China, now the world's biggest carbons emitter, had backed the two-stage proposal in Singapore.
Chinese President Hu Jintao instead focused his remarks at the breakfast meeting on the need to establish a funding mechanism for rich nations to provide financial support to developing countries to fight climate change. He was echoed by Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who said that if an agreement could be reached on a mechanism for global financing at Copenhagen it would be "much easier to achieve clear and pragmatic measures".
On Saturday, the presidents of France and Brazil jointly urged rich countries to cut emissions of greenhouse gases by at least 80 percent from their 1990 levels by 2050 and give poorer nations substanial aid to tackle emissions. The European Commission reiterated on Sunday that it wanted an operational agreement with real political commitment and including numbers on financing.
Britain's Energy and Climate Secretary Ed Miliband told the BBC the issue was tough but he was "quite optimistic". "It is about saving the world ... If we can get a very clear set of commitments from the world's leaders in Copenhagen on how they're going to cut their emissions - not just Europe, not just the United States but India and China and other countries - then that will be a very major step forward," he said.
Despite the talk in Singapore of urgent action on climate change, a statement issued after the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) summit dropped an earlier draft's reference to halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Environmental lobby group WWF voiced disappointment.
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