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US, Aus 'must warm to change'
03/02/2007 11:27 - (SA)
Canberra - Environmentalists and political officials pressed the United States and Australia to sign the Kyoto Protocol on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and urged other governments to cut pollution after a United Nations report warned of catastrophic global warming.
Officials in Indonesia and the Maldives, two archipelagos threatened by rising sea levels, said they feared for their countries' future.
Others said the threat was not simply to the environment, but to international peace, prosperity and development.
Maldives foreign minister Ahmed Saeed said rising oceans could have devastating effects on low-lying countries like his coral island nation, which is 1m above sea level in the Indian Ocean.
"If the sea level rises permanently, it will submerge the whole country forever," said Saeed.
Indonesia's environment minister, Rachmat Witoelar, predicted that the sea would swallow about 2 000 of Indonesia's estimated 18 000 islands within three decades because of man-made climate change.
"Developing countries must make binding commitments to cut emissions by 40% to 60%," he said.
Report is a 'wake-up call'
"And we in Indonesia must guard against the burning of our forests and better monitor our industries."
Environmental affairs minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk described the report as "a wake-up call to the world's largest emitter, the US".
The US and Australia are the only industrialised countries that have refused to commit to Kyoto emission targets.
But US President George W Bush's administration and Australian Prime Minister John Howard stood fast against mandatory targets despite the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, reporting on Friday that there was a 90% certainty that human activity had caused escalating temperatures, glacial melting and rising oceans.
US energy secretary Samuel Bodman warned of possible "unintended consequences" - including job losses - if the government required widespread caps on carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels.
It's a 'screaming siren'
Howard dismissed the Kyoto pact and renewable energy sources like wind or solar power as ways to fight climate change and argued that Australia must take the unpopular step of introducing nuclear power.
"Let's be realistic. You can only run power stations in a modern Western economy on fossil fuel, or, in time, nuclear power," Howard told reporters on Saturday.
Australian opposition leader Kevin Rudd said Australia had to sign the Kyoto deal, use more renewable energy sources and create a national strategy to reduce electricity consumption.
The landmark report from the world's leading climate scientists and government officials said global warming was "unequivocal", "very likely" man-made and would "continue for centuries" - findings bleaker than its last report in 2001.
"If the last IPCC report was a wake up call, this one is a screaming siren," said Stephanie Tunmore of Greenpeace.
- AP
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