A U.N. deal due this year to fight global warming is set to avoid tough penalties for nations that fail to keep their promises, relying instead on persuasion and peer pressure, delegates at climate talks said Thursday.
The approach is a shift from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which originally obliged about 40 developed nations to cut emissions and called for punishments for noncompliance. But those were never enforced — Canada and Japan, for instance, simply dropped out.
Officials from almost 200 nations are meeting at the U.N. conference in Geneva, from Feb. 8 to Friday, to work on a deal due at a summit in Paris in December to curb global warming.