Talks on a communique to be issued at the UN summit on sustainable development here were suspended for five hours Tuesday after Brazil failed to overcome objections from Europe, delegates said.
Hosting the 10-day conference, Brazil had hoped to wrap up a deal before heads of state and government start arriving on Tuesday on the eve of a three-day summit.
“We did our best to incorporate the concerns (of delegations), right up to the last minute,” Brazilian Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota said.
A plenary will convene at 1330 GMT after countries have had a chance to look at a reworked text, he told reporters.
The conference is looking at a 50-page draft that spells out measures to tackle Earth’s worsening environment problems and ease poverty by spurring greener growth.
But the European Union is holding out for stronger commitments, notably on changes to the world’s governance of the environment and on a “Sustainable Development Goals” plan that will succeed the UN Millennium Development Goals after they expire in 2015.
“There is no agreement right now because we (Europeans) have been unable to see the text,” French Ecology Minister Nicole Bricq said.
Claudia Salerno, Venezuela’s chief delegate, told AFP there also remained discord on measures to protect the oceans and funding to promote greener growth in poor countries.
Environmentalists and campaigners for poverty eradication complain that the draft has been gutted of contentious or ambitious language in the search for consensus.
Dubbed the “Rio+20” summit, the meeting is the 20-year follow-up to a landmark conference that promised to roll back climate change, desertification and species loss.
