My collegaue Quirin Schiermeier has a round-up of the UN climate talks in Bonn over on Nature News. The overall assessment? Not much progress, with developed and developing nations coming to loggerheads over the issues of money and targets. Quirin writes:

Developing countries, including South Africa, India and China, told the Bonn meeting that they expect rich nations to commit to a 40% cut by 2020. Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), acknowledged that getting rich nations to agree to 25–40% emissions cuts by 2020 will be “very difficult”.

Another point of contention was the money that poorer countries will need for adaptation programmes. The UNFCCC’s Least Developed Countries Fund allows rich countries to support such programmes in the poorest nations and thus meet some of that need, but to date it stands at only US$172 million. Overall, development agencies talk of a need for sums at least 100 times greater.

Even the change in the US delegation hasn’t brought clarity to these two seemingly perrenial problems. You can read the full story here.