The world is set to fail to make deep enough cuts in greenhouse gases in the next decade to tackle global warming, the U.N.'s top climate official said on Monday in a bleak assessment of the prospects for a U.N. deal.
Despite his gloomy short-term outlook, Yvo de Boer, who will step down on July 1 after about four years in the job, expressed confidence governments would eventually enact sufficiently tough goals, such as an emissions cut by rich nations of 80 percent by 2050.
"I don't see the process delivering adequate mitigation targets in the next decade," de Boer told a news conference midway through two weeks of talks in Bonn among senior government negotiators from about 185 nations.
"Over the longer term we will get this issue under control," de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, added in a webcast news briefing. Targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions are referred to as "mitigation".
The U.N. panel of climate scientists has suggested that industrialised nations would have to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25-40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 to put the world on track to avoid dangerous global warming.
