The latest round of UN climate talks, which concluded in Bangkok today (5 September), have indicated that no further action will be taken on climate change within the next decade.

Countries including the United States have pressed for the UN to “be silent” on climate change issues about which there is no agreement among members (as reportedly said by a US negotiator in session), claiming that no further agreement could be reached this year. Efforts to cement a second commitment to the Kyoto Protocol have also been slowed by reluctance on the part of the EU and Australia, among others, to follow through on commitments made at last year’s Durban summit.

Reactions to the lack of progress on both climate change agreements as well as a re-commitment to the Kyoto Protocol have been strongly disapproving and even sparked protests.

"There are substantive proposals on the table that go to the heart of addressing the climate crisis.”, said Lidy Nacpil, Director of Jubilee South Asia and Pacific Movement on Debt and Development. “They provide for agreeing to a shared vision and global goal for emission limits, to ensuring comparable efforts between countries prior to 2020, to ensuring that finance and technology is available for developing countries – on all of this the US and other rich industrialised countries are saying: 'We should be silent, it's too hard, too inconvenient, asks too much of big polluters.' Yet it is the millions of the world's poorest who will have to pay the price and are already paying.”

Speaking about the Kyoto Protocol, Mohamed Adow, International Advisor on Climate Change at Christian Aid, said: "Bangkok has been the process of peeling back the banana skin of the 'Durban agreement' and it's clear the insides are very soft and squishy. Although the world understood Durban to confirm that here would be a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, and a set of ambitious decisions to enhance the implementation of the climate convention, this session suggests that this will not be, in any meaningful sense of the words."

Asad Rehman, Head of International Climate at Friends of the Earth EWNI (England Wales and Northern Ireland), added: "The Kyoto Protocol that the European Union wants here is one that is not legal, but merely a ‘political decision’. It would also not include a science-based determination of countries' targets. And the EU is now trying to negotiate an 'out' where it doesn't have to talk about what it's really going to do until 2016. It's a sham of what was agreed in Durban and it would be a suicide pill for the world to swallow this."

The UN, meanwhile, claimed the talks in Bangkok had resulted in ‘concrete progress on key issues’ ahead of the next official UN Conference on Climate Change, to be held in Doha later this year.

In a statement released on its website, the UN cited several achievements of the Bangkok talks including:

• the production of an unofficial paper outlining the elements of a final decision on the extension of the Kyoto Protocol, which involves the construction of ‘a fine and detailed set of legal checks and balances’;
• plans for a new market-based approach to global warming, meant to boost international cooperation on climate action;
• and the start of the process of outlining governments’ vision for the new universal agreement promised in Durban and identification of ‘concrete actions to bridge the ambition gap’.

Contrary to its critics, the UN also said that in Bangkok, a working group "drilled down into the detail of what needs to be done to resolve differences of opinion over the length of the second commitment period and reach compromise".