Governments will try today to streamline an 89-page draft text of a U.N. deal to fight climate change due to be agreed in Paris in December, hoping to avoid the acrimony of the last failed attempt.
The 190-nation talks among senior officials in Bonn, from June 1-11, will try to narrow down vastly differing options, ranging from promises to slash greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050 to vague pledges to curb rising emissions.
The talks are to prepare for a conference in Paris in six months' time to agree a global deal to curb climate change that a U.N. panel blames for a rise in temperatures and more severe droughts, floods and rising sea levels.
Time is starting to run short to distil the draft, which has 4,232 lines of text and hundreds of brackets, into a meaningful document.
Christiana Figueres, the U.N.'s climate change chief, said there was a far better atmosphere than in 2009, when a summit in Copenhagen broke down in acrimony.
Bonn will be a test of whether a rare mood of harmony at the last meeting in Geneva in February can be sustained. In Geneva, all nations were allowed to add as many options as they wanted to the draft text to get all ideas on the table.
One problem is how to make the deal legally binding. Top emitters, led by China and the United States, favor a deal built from national pledges to cut emissions, anchored in domestic laws.
But many developing nations favor a binding international treaty. Bolivia even wants a new tribunal to punish violators.
PHOTO: In this photo from December 2014, people listen as Peru's President Ollanta Humala delivers a speech during the High Level Segment of the U.N. Climate Change Conference COP 20 in Lima, Peru.
CREDIT: REUTERS/Enrique Castro-Mendivil.