OSLO (Reuters) - Germany will host an extra session of U.N. climate talks in April but it is too early to say if the world will agree a new treaty this year after falling short at a summit in Copenhagen in December, Denmark said on Monday.
"The negotiations are picking up speed again after Copenhagen," Danish Climate and Energy Minister Lykke Friis, who presides over the U.N. negotiations, told Reuters by telephone.
She said that 11 representatives of key nations decided at a one-day meeting at the headquarters of the Bonn-based U.N. Climate Change Secretariat to add an extra session of senior officials from 194 nations in the Germany city from April 9-11.
"There was a positive and constructive atmosphere and all parties were eager to move forward with the negotiations," she said of the first formal meeting since Copenhagen.
Until now, the calendar had been limited to a session of officials in Bonn from May 31-June 11 and ministerial talks in Cancun, Mexico from November 29-December 10. That was a sharp slowdown from the five preparatory talks last year before Copenhagen.
Friis said she was unsure if U.N. talks would end this year with a new U.N. treaty to combat global warming and succeed the existing Kyoto Protocol. "We are working for an agreement in Cancun but it's too early to say," she said.
TREATY
Last year, many nations had hoped that the Copenhagen summit would agree a legally binding treaty to slow rising emissions of greenhouse gases blamed by the U.N.'s panel of climate experts for floods, droughts, mudslides, heatwaves and rising seas.