Climate changing?

In the last week of May, two key groups of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) met to negotiate emissions reductions commitments under the Kyoto Protocol. But the subsidiary bodies and the ad hoc working group (awg) failed to achieve any breakthrough in developing a policy to deal with climate change.

Held in Bonn, Germany, experts saw the meeting as a "hangover meeting" following the euphoric experience of the first conference of parties in Montreal in 2005. It was the first session of awg, where delegates exchanged their initial views on the process for considering future commitments for Annex I parties (industrialised countries) for the post-2012 period, when the Kyoto Protocol's first commitment period ends.

However, there was little progress on the two key pieces of the adaptation agenda: the adaptation fund and the five-year programme of work on adaptation.