Thaindian News

United Nations, May 13 (IANS) The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres Thursday urged the international community to “pick up speed” on the next step towards achieving the long-term solution to climate change.

“Governments work(ing) towards this can and should pick up speed and focus on all fronts,” Figueres told reporters during a press conference here.

Citing the UN climate deal reached in Cancun in December 2010, she said it was the “most comprehensible package ever agreed to help developing countries deal with climate change.”

“But this needs now to be built in the coming few months,” Figueres said.

Dubbed the “Cancun Agreements,” the decisions include formalising mitigation pledges and ensuring increased accountability for them, as well as taking concrete actions to protect the world’s forests.

But in Cancun, “what they did not do was achieve the greater political certainty needed to raise the current emission reduction emissions to the point where they would keep the global temperature rise to a maximum of two degrees Celsius bearing in mind, that even that is not sufficient to guarantee the survival of low-lying states.”

Meanwhile, work to design new climate institutions has begun and needs to be completed for this year’s UN Conference in December which will be held in Durban, South Africa.

Governments have two major tasks before Durban — to agree to ways to strengthen international conditions that will allow nations to work together to make deeper, greater emission cuts, and they need to design new climate institutions to provide adequate support for developing nations, Figueres said.