The 27-nation EU is demanding a roadmap and a deadline for finalising a legally binding framework for climate action by all major emitters, members of the EU delegation said in a press briefing in Durban on Monday.

The EU’s Tomasz Chruszczow said the EU considered an ambitious, comprehensive and legally binding global climate framework, which engaged all major economies, as urgent to keep the global mean temperature rise to less than 2 °C above pre-industrial levels.

The framework should be based on clear rules and should preserve the essential elements of the Kyoto Protocol, the first commitment period of which expires at the end of 2012.

“Kyoto is no longer sufficient on its own as it requires only developed countries to limit their emissions. Moreover, the US, Japan, Russia and Canada have said they will not join in a second commitment period, so the protocol is unlikely to cover more than 16% of global emissions after 2012,” EU's Arthur Runge-Metzger said.

The EU is open to a second Kyoto period on condition that agreement is reached on:
· The roadmap and deadline for a comprehensive and legally binding global climate framework that should enter into force no later than 2020;

· Strengthening the Kyoto Protocol’s environmental integrity through a robust accounting framework for forest management and through a solution to the issue of the surplus emission targets from the first commitment period. This solution must be non-discriminatory and preserve incentives for over achievement of emission targets; and

· Establishing one or more new market-based mechanisms in order to boost the development of a robust international carbon market.

The EU also called for all decisions taken at last year’s climate meeting in Cancun, Mexico, to become operational and to address issues that were unresolved.

In particular, Chruszczow said guidelines were needed to make operational an enhanced system of transparency so that it would clear whether countries were delivering on their emission pledges up to 2020.

The EU also wants to see decisions taken that bring into operation the Green Climate Fund for financing climate action in developing countries and new institutions in the areas of technology and adaptation.

To date, the EU has delivered €7.2-billion in “fast start” climate finance it pledged to developing countries over the period 2010 to 2012. To date, €4.68-billion has been mobilised.

The US has contributed $5.2-billion in fast-start climate finance, of which $3.1-billion was mobilised in 2011, said Jonathan Pershing, deputy special envoy for climate change with the US State Department.

Pershing, like his EU counterparts, also called for the agreements in Cancun to become operational, as well as for the creation of a transparent climate change regime for “developed and developing countries”.

A post 2020 framework, he said, would require significant amount of discussions and any possibility of the US committing to any legally binding agreement would require that such an agreement was premised on all nations, developing and developed, coming to the party.