Figueres Urges Smaller Steps at UN Global Warming Negotiations

Costa Rica’s Christiana Figueres took charge of United Nations climate talks, calling on nations to do the “politically possible” and take smaller steps rather than striving for an all-encompassing deal to halt global warming.

After the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in December failed to produce a new treaty, about 190 countries are still grappling to agree on more ambitious greenhouse-gas cuts to contain the global average temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). The task has a “rapidly rising scale and urgency,” Figueres told delegates today at the start of five days of negotiations in Bonn.