COP 21 | Climate talks get down to tough business of compromise

From deserts encroaching on African farmland to rising sea levels shrinking islands of the South Pacific, leaders of poor nations most affected by climate change shared their stories of global warming with leaders of some of the richest yesterday.
The encounters highlighted one of the biggest debates in the effort to reach an international accord to fight global warming: how much aid rich countries should give poor ones to help them adapt to climate change and reduce their emissions.
French President Francois Hollande heard from 12 African leaders who described the Sahara Desert encroaching on farmland, forests disappearing from Congo to Madagascar and rising sea levels swallowing homes in West African river deltas.
“When a young student is forced to go study under a street lamp at night, it clearly demonstrates the electricity issue,” Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita said.
Hollande said France would invest billions of euros in the coming years for renewable energy in Africa and to increase Africans’ access to electricity: “The world, and in particular the developed world, owes the African continent an environmental debt.”
Later yesterday, President Barack Obama was meeting in Paris with envoys from island nations hit hard by rising seas and increasingly violent storms, which scientists attribute to climate change prompted by man-made carbon emissions.
Yesterday, the negotiations began in earnest, with the key task of figuring out who will pay for everything the leaders said needs to be done.
Developing countries say they need financial support and technology to relocate threatened populations and make their own transition to cleaner energy.
With a new fund announced Monday, rich countries pledged a total of USD248 million toward that effort. The Obama administration didn’t specify where its $51 million pledge would come from; Obama has struggled to persuade the Republican-run Congress to fund his climate goals, amid concerns that his energy plan is unattainable.
The talks, which run through Dec. 11, are aimed at a broader, tougher replacement to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. That treaty required only rich countries to cut their emissions, while this time the goal is for everyone to pitch in. Sylvie Corbet and Angela Charlton, Le Bourget, AP