Developed countries should honor their climate pledges

The highly-anticipated climate talks in Paris are inching their way towards an "ambitious" agreement on the global carbon budget from 2020 onward. A deal is expected to be clinched on Friday, after two week's bargaining mainly between the world's poorest countries and the richest.

No matter how ambitious the final outcome is, there is a danger that the developed economies are faced with a "lost decade" in terms of failing to deliver on their climate promises for the poor countries.

This inconvenient conclusion can be draw from the 50-page draft agreement text reached by the negotiators in. Reading through the text reveals no mention on how the rich countries will fulfill their promises of funding support and technology transfer by 2020 to boost the capacities of developing countries to fight climate change.

Many may say the ongoing talks deal with the climate challenge after 2020, and it is understandable that the implementation of the old agreement is not part of the accord.

But when we aim further and higher, we need to assess what we have achieved previously. If we could not reach the goals we agreed, there will be doubts about whether we can achieve the ambitious new goals or not.

Let us look at the goals first. In the Copenhagen Accord which more than 140 countries including the United States, Japan and China and European powers signed in 2009, the developed economies made two funding commitments.

First, they committed to offering "new and additional resources", amounting to $30 billion, for the period 2010 to 2012 to help poor countries fight climate change.

Additionally, they committed to a goal of jointly mobilizing $100 billion a year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries.