BONN, Germany — Talking won’t save the planet. Climate negotiators are starting to catch on.
On the banks of the Rhine, diplomats from almost 200 nations spent the past two weeks arguing over linguistic details while grappling with the growing sense that what mattered more lay outside their negotiation rooms.
On Thursday, countries wrapped up climate talks in the former West German capital, Bonn, where negotiators sought to lay the groundwork for COP31, taking place in Antalya, Turkey, in November.
But as they debated textual references, the fate of work programs, and the definitions of past agreements, many delegates found that the divide between real-world efforts to rein in climate change and their squabbles over technical language felt starker than ever.
