COPENHAGEN -- After two weeks of rancor and uncertainty, the U.N.-sponsored climate talks ended Saturday morning with negotiators choosing to "take note" of an agreement brokered by the United States but failing to adopt it as an official decision of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The anti-climactic ending to an intense final round of negotiations underscored the incomplete nature of the accord, which provided for monitoring emission cuts in individual countries but set no overall global target for cutting greenhouse gases and no deadline for reaching a formal international treaty.
The United Nations' top climate official, Yvo de Boer, acknowledged that the agreement, known as the Copenhagen accord, has yet to bind large and small nations to either definitive emission reductions or financial commitments.
"The challenge for the coming year will be to capture that, and to turn it into something real, measurable and verifiable, in every sense of those three words, a year from now in Mexico City," he told reporters.
Describing what it means "to take note" of the accord, de Boer added, "That is a way of recognizing that something is there, but not going so far as to associate yourself with it." Read more.
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