CRI听力:Difficult Lima Talks Reach Deal on Climate Change

The annual United Nations climate talks have wrapped up in Lima, Peru, after delegates from more than 190 countries reached a compromise deal that sets the stage for a global climate pact in Paris next year.

Under the deal, governments will submit national plans for reining in greenhouse gas emissions by an informal deadline of March 31, 2015 to form the basis of a global agreement due at the Paris summit.

The UN climate change body is to report back on the national pledges in November 2015.

The deal includes common responsibilities, and those that are unique to individual or groups of nations.

It also restores a promise to poorer countries that a "loss and damage" scheme will be established to help them cope with the financial implications of rising temperatures.

Differences over the draft text caused the two-week talks to overrun by two days, mainly due to divisions between rich and poor countries over how to spread the burden of pledges to cut carbon emissions.

U.S. Special Climate Change Envoy Todd Stern says a joint U.S.-China deal last month to curb emissions has helped show new ways to bridge a stand-off between rich and poor.

"The way that we were able to deal with that issue between the U.S. and China in the joint announcement of a few weeks ago actually ended up coming in quite handy here. Minister Xie and I, were able to offer that language up in effect to, and it found its way into this text, as a way of kind of getting through that difficulty, so that was quite useful."

Christiana Figueres, the U.N.'s climate chief, also considers the Lima deal to be a good beginning.

"I believe that we have seen over the past five years but certainly here that policy is catching up with science. Definitely moving forward and much remains to be done in Paris next year, but I think a very important step in all the different issues that now the COP president has enumerated already policy catching up with science."

The head of the Chinese delegation, Xie Zhenhua, says the Lima conference has paved the way for the Paris meeting next year, but he expects the Paris meeting to be more difficult.