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Bali Roadmap 'the first step'
15/12/2007 20:04 - (SA)
Nusa Dua, Indonesia - Joy and relief, but also frustration and anger, erupted at the UN climate conference in Bali on Saturday after the talks set a strategy aimed at reducing climate change from mortal peril to manageable problem.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon hailed the launch of the so-called Bali Roadmap after he had jetted to the Indonesian resort island to make a desperate last-ditch appeal for a breakthrough in the negotiation marathon.
"The Bali Roadmap that has been agreed is a pivotal first step toward an agreement that can address the threat of climate change, the defining challenge of our time," Ban said in a statement.
Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) staging the talks, described the deal as "a real breakthrough, a real opportunity for the international community to successfully fight climate change."
"Parties have recognised the urgency of action on climate change and have now provided the political response to what scientists have been telling us is needed," he added.
Two-year negotiations
The accord launches a two-year round of negotiations for the most ambitious treaty ever attempted for reining in greenhouse gases, the carbon pollution from fossil fuels damaging Earth's climate system.
But under US pressure, the deal dodged the explicit goal of halving these emissions by 2050 or of embracing a commitment by industrialised economies to slash their own emissions by 2020 to help set the horse-trading in motion.
Both had been set down by the European Union, supported by developing countries, as a prerequisite for negotiations that would be bold and put the whip to rich countries historically to blame for global warming.
Despite this frustration, European countries said that, at the least, the global process had been saved from collapse and two years remained, climaxing in Denmark at the end of 2009, for sorting out such key problems under the Roadmap.
And, they said, the format included the United States, the world's biggest economy and No 1 emitter, which since it rejected the Kyoto Protocol in 2001 has been almost a pariah in the climate-change fold.
Nobody wanted failure
"In the end, nobody wanted to have a failure," said German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel.
"It is a great step forward... We have achieved more than we could have expected before, but it is less than what is needed to meet the urgency of the problem."
The future "is Copenhagen, it's not Bali," said French Ecology Minister Jean-Louis Borloo.
Hilary Benn, British secretary of state for environment, said that compromise had been inevitable given the need to reconcile so many different national positions.
"If we didn't have this deal today we wouldn't have that door to walk through, we wouldn't have a path to travel from Bali to Copenhagen, that's what we have secured today, that's why this is a historic breakthrough," he said.
The United States climbed down from a last-minute threat to veto the draft after coming in for stinging criticism from other delegates.
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