UN calls for end to deadlock
2007-09-24 12:31
New York - UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was to heap pressure on world leaders on Monday, urging them to smash a deadlock threatening an upcoming conference on climate change in Bali.
Ban was to make the keynote address at an unprecedented world summit entitled "The Future in Our Hands: Addressing the Leadership Challenge of Climate Change."
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, in the vanguard of climate action at state level in the US, was also to address the meeting.
Around 150 countries were taking part in the one-day event, some 80 of them at the level of head of state and government, making it the most senior UN gathering ever on climate change.
European countries, which have seized the political lead among industrialised countries in pledging cuts to their own emissions, were expected to seek a global commitment for a breakthrough at the December 3-14 meeting in Bali, Indonesia.
That meeting has the task of setting down a roadmap for negotiations that hopefully will conclude at the end of 2009 with a deal to accelerate and deepen cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases.
Once ratified - a process that should take a couple of years - the accord will succeed the first phase of the UN's Kyoto Protocol, which expires at the end of 2012.
Kyoto opposed by US
Kyoto's future has been darkened since 2001, when the United States, the world's biggest polluter, declared it would not ratify the treaty.
President George W Bush fiercely opposes Kyoto's binding caps and instead argues in favour of voluntary measures backed by technology transfer.
Green critics feel this is a tactic to delay Kyoto and divide its supporters by promoting the idea of a cosier, less ambitious alternative.
"I'd like to see a commitment from a majority of heads of state on using and strengthening the present (treaty) architecture and not reinventing it," said Steve Sawyer, secretary general of the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC), a Brussels-based group lobbying for wind power.
"Reinventing Kyoto will take 10 years to negotiate, and we don't have the time."
Meeting of world's biggest carbon polluters
The UN summit was to unfold in four parallel sessions, covering adapation to climate change, mitigation of greenhouse-gas emissions, technology and financing.
Ban was to present a summary of conclusions at the end of the day, following this with a dinner gathering representatives from the world's biggest carbon polluters.
On Thursday and Friday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will host a meeting in Washington of the world's 16 biggest polluters, plus representatives the European Union (EU) and the United Nations.
Together these economies represent around 90% of global emissions.
Initiated by Bush, the meeting will launch a 15-month process during which these economies can spell out what they intend to do on climate change and explore technological paths and industrial sectors that could achieve relatively quick and painless cuts in emissions.
- SAPA