Haste needed on climate deals, U.N. warns

UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 24 (UPI) -- There is an urgent need to tackle key climate change issues as the next major summit is barely two months away, the U.N.'s chief environmental czar said.

Global climate negotiations remain deadlocked after the Copenhagen climate summit last year ended without a binding climate protection agreement.

Developing nations have resisted a legally binding treaty because they claim rich nations that have benefited from emitting greenhouse gases during the past decades should shoulder more of the burden. Industrialized countries argue the developing nations need to commit to concrete reduction targets to enable a global effort

Christiana Figueres, executive director at the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, said governments need to take firm steps to tackle climate change ahead the November conference in Cancun, Mexico.

"On the whole, governments have been cognizant this year that there is an urgent need to move forward and they have been collaborating in moving beyond their national positions to begin to identify common ground so that they can reach several agreements in Cancun," the United Nations' news agency quoted her as saying.

She added that negotiations were moving ahead on key issues like technology sharing and deforestation but there was more work to be done.

"Let me be clear -- there is no magic bullet, no one climate agreement that will solve everything right now," she said.

A negotiating summit in preparation for the Cancun meeting is scheduled for next week in China.