COP21: Climate deal 'final draft' reached in Paris

Organizers of the climate talks in Paris say a final draft text has been reached after nearly two weeks of intensive negotiations.

An official in the office of French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told the AFP news agency the draft would be presented to ministers at 10h30 GMT.

No details of the proposed agreement have been released so far.

The tentative deal was reached nearly 16 hours after the talks had been scheduled to close.

"We have a text to present," the official said, adding that the draft would be now translated into the UN's six official languages.

Analysts say that this is not a done deal - it will only be finally adopted if there are no objections raised at Saturday morning's ministerial meeting, and even this is unlikely to come before afternoon in the French capital.

Fabius, who has presided over the talks, had said earlier that the "conditions were never better" for a strong and ambitious agreement. Significant progress had been reported on a range of issues, with evidence of real compromise between the parties.

He added that countries supported a goal of keeping global temperature rises to 2C but agreed to make their best efforts to keep it to 1.5C. However, the language on cutting emissions in the long term was criticised for significantly watering down ambition. The question of different demands on different countries, depending on their wealth and level of development - called "differentiation" at the talks - was said to be the root cause of the difficulties.

Another major difficulty was transparency - richer countries want a single system of measuring, reporting and verifying the commitments countries make as part of this agreement.

It is said to be crucial to the US, which wants to ensure that China is subject to the same sort of oversight as it is. China and India are not keen on this type of oversight.

UN climate conference 30 November - 11 December 2015

COP 21 - the 21st session of the Conference of the Parties - has seen more than 190 nations gather in Paris to discuss a possible new global agreement on climate change, aimed at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to avoid the threat of dangerous warming due to human activities.

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