Climate ministers and top negotiators from dozens of nations remain deadlocked over how to cut greenhouse gases less than three months before the next major international climate summit.

The UN’s top climate official told a high-level gathering on Saturday that the key issues “are frankly in a deadlock” and the official negotiating text is bogged down by national interests.

But Christiana Figueres said some governments are trying to “rebuild the sense of trust in the process and rekindle the commitment to deliver” some agreements and funding.

“Governments have realized this year that you don’t build tall buildings without laying the foundations, unlike last year when they tried to build a very tall building without laying the foundations,” she later told The Associated Press. [Read more...]

England needs to spend up to one billion pounds a year to protect fragile wildlife habitats from climate change, intensive farming and population growth, a government-backed report said on Friday.

It urged the government to transform conservation policy in the next 40 years to avoid a devastating loss of the countryside that supports thousands of important plants, trees and animals.

British ecologist John Lawton, who led the year-long study, said England’s wildlife habitats are too small and isolated to protect many species from increased strains in coming decades.

Creating a stronger, better connected network of well-managed habitats will cost between 600 million pounds and 1.1 billion pounds each year, the report estimated. [Read more...]