15 Dec, 2009, Copenhagen

The UN’s climate chief has warned that The Negotiations at the Copenhagen summit are progressing very slowly. Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of the UN’s climate body claimed that there was still an enormous amount of work that needed to be done before the final deal could be signed.

Delegates are now poring over the details of new draft text, ahead the start of conference’s high-level segment on the Tuesday evening. About 120 world leaders will attend the summit’s final session on Friday. The UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown will be one of the first leaders arriving in the evening. The Non-governmental organizations are protesting that many campaigners will be turned away from venue.

Many more people have applied to attend summit than Copenhagen’s Bella Center can behold, and NGO numbers will progressively get reduced during rest of the week, partly for security reasons as heads of state as well as government arrive.

The talks on Monday were temporarily suspended after the delegation representing developing nations withdrew the co-operation. Following the action by African group that was supported by the wider G77-China bloc of the developing nations, some sessions ran long into the night as the negotiators tried to make up for the lost time.

The Danish conference hosts have been accused of trying to sideline the negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol by packaging the discussion of outstanding difficult issues from across the various strands into the one single informal session.