G-77 concerned over too many treaty drafts at Copenhagen

A child holds up a banner calling for action on climate change, in Washington. The climate conference begins on Monday in Copenhagen.

Ahead of a key climate change summit, the representatives from G-77 nations and China spent two days in a conference room here, discussing their strategy for the meeting and speculating on possible outcomes and its position on specific issues.

One main issue that has emerged among several members of the group, according to the Indian delegation, is deep concern over the several drafts of a potential agreement that are floating around including the BASIC (Brazil, South Korea, India, China) draft that has been recently circulated as well as the Danish draft, which is yet to be fully disclosed.

These documents are outside the drafts being worked on by the working groups within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) called the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-Term Cooperative Action and the Ad Hoc Working Group on Kyoto Protocol that are charged with coming up with a text.

Several rounds of meetings under the UNFCCC banner have yielded around fifteen negotiating papers and concerned parties believe that at some point all will converge into one single text.

At the recent meetings, countries within the G-77 stated that so many external texts and parallel process would not be manageable.