It will be a long night for delegates hammering out details of the Kyoto treaty on climate change in Marrakech, Morocco; talks are scheduled to end today but are likely to drag on to midnight or beyond. Although a compromise has been reached by the majority of participating countries, including the European Union and the G77 group of developing nations, a handful of industrial nations — Russia, Japan, Canada, and Australia — continue to stonewall. The unresolved issues include how to report and verify carbon emissions; how to inventory forests and rangeland; and how to set up a system so that countries which fail to meet emissions targets can buy emissions credits from other countries. Meanwhile, Russia, which must ratify the treaty for it to take effect, wants a nearly twofold increase in the number of credits it can claim for its forestry projects. For the inside story on the wheeling and dealing, read the updates by our correspondents in Marrakech, only on the Grist Magazine, website.
