Noting that climate talks in Barcelona were not meant to resolve tough political issues on finance and emission reduction targets, United Nations climate chief, Yvo de Boer, said the negotiations before the Copenhagen summit should be used to consolidate areas of consensus.
"We have advanced significantly in the negotiations on adaptation, technology transfer, on capacity building, and from reducing emissions from deforestation, and Barcelona can be an important opportunity to cast that in language that can go forward to Copenhagen," said Boer, the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
"This will not be a spectacular session but, it will be an important one," he added.
The five-day meet in Barcelona till December 7 is the last in the series of talks on the climate issue among governments meeting this December in Danish capital.
192 countries will meet at the Climate Change Conference in December and are expected to hammer out a climate treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol since the first commitment period under this treaty ends in 2012.
"At Copenhagen, governments must give their clear answer on what they will do to avoid dangerous climate change and how they will do it," Boer said.
The UN climate chief added Copenhagen can and must capture a result to which nations can be held accountable.
The industrialised countries are required to cut emissions between 25 and 40 per cent by 2020 and that global emissions would need to be reduced by at least 50 per cent by 2050 in order to stave off the worst effects of climate change.
"The targets of industrialised countries that are presently on the table are clearly not ambitious enough," the UN’s top climate change official said, calling for more ambitious targets on an individual basis.
Pointing out that heads of State at the UN climate summit in New York agreed to generate financial and technological resources, to assist in the adaptation and mitigation needs of developing countries, Boer called for more commitment to actually bring this into force.
"The magnitude of long-term finance has been recognised, but more clarity on precise contributions from industrialised countries is needed ahead of Copenhagen," he said.
