BONN, Germany, June 14 (UPI) -- Delegates to the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany, say they made progress toward reaching a new universal climate change agreement.
"Over the past12 months, solid foundations have been laid under the process both toward the 2015 agreement and in raising pre-2020 ambition," Co-chairs Jayant Moreshver Mauskar and Harald Dovland said in a joint statement Friday. "As a result of the constructive and flexible engagement among governments, nations now have a clearer idea of how to move to achieve demonstrable progress at the upcoming U.N. Climate Change Conference in Poland and beyond."
One element of the summit in Bonn was work on how to transform the world's energy systems quickly enough toward low-carbon levels, including renewable energy, energy efficiency and the consideration of carbon capture and storage, the United Nations said in a release.
"This has been an important meeting because governments are moving faster now from the stage of exploring options to designing and implementing solutions. Governments are demonstrating increasingly broad support for this energy transformation," the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change's executive secretary, Christiana Figueres, said.
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In Bonn, participants also examined how the rules for a new, universal climate agreement -- which must be decided by 2015 and will be effective in 2020 -- should be designed to encourage countries to do their best to act on climate change in the longer term, including transparency and accountability, the organization said.
Delegates also examined specific means to increase finance, technology and capacity-building for developing countries, and how these efforts could be tied to the 2015 agreement.
The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change is the parent treaty of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
