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Time for work on Cancun deal - UN climate chief Mexico City (AFP) March 24, 2011 The UN's climate chief on Thursday urged countries to flesh out last December's worldwide deal in Cancun, including details of a fund to help poor countries badly exposed to the impacts of global warming. Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), said a meeting in Bangkok from April 3-8 had to pave the way to "the next big climate step" in Durban, South Africa, at year's end. "The world was at a crossroads in Cancun and took a step forward towards a climate-safe world," Figueres said in a press statement, released at a meeting in Mexico City of more than three dozen countries. "Now governments must move purposefully down the path they have set." The Bangkok meeting had to set up a "clear work plan" for 2011 to follow up Cancun, she said. "This includes work on making the institutions for climate funding, technology cooperation and adaptation fully functional within the deadlines agreed in Cancun," said Figueres. The so-called Green Climate Fund established in Cancun will potentially channel hundreds of billions of dollars in aid for poor climate-vulnerable countries. But its key architecture -- notably where the funds should be spent and how they should be accounted for -- has still to be drawn up. A transitional committee that will propose the design is to hold a maiden meeting in Mexico City on Monday and Tuesday, Figueres said. Two other institutions agreed in Cancun are a "technology mechanism" for promoting clean technologies and an "adaptation framework" to boost international cooperation for poor countries in the fight against worsening drought, flood and rising seas. Ministers or senior officials from around 40 countries attended the meeting in Mexico City, billed as a "stakeholders' dialogue" to assess the state of play since Cancun, a UNFCCC official said. After Bangkok, the forum meets in Bonn from June 6-17 at senior level and in Durban, South Africa, from November 28-December 9, ending at ministerial level. The talks in Cancun last November 28-December 11 also yielded a rallying call to cap warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) but split badly over the future of the UNFCCC's Kyoto Protocol, whose first round of emissions-cutting pledges expires at the end of next year.
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