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BANGKOK: Negotiators from around the world got to work Monday on
drafting a battle plan against global warming that a top UN official
warned could be the most complicated treaty in history.
The talks came amid a growing consensus between
rich and poor countries that the world must take action to halt
climate change, which scientists warn could put millions of people
at risk by century’s end.
“You have gathered to launch a negotiating
process that is tasked with changing the course of history,” UN
Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon said in a videotaped address to the
conference’s opening in Bangkok.
A total of 164 countries are taking part in the
five-day meeting, which is meant to start figuring out which country
does what after 2012, when obligations run out under the Kyoto
Protocol.
The talks are the first under an agreement
reached at a major conference in December in Bali, Indonesia, that
called for a new treaty on global warming by the end of 2009.
UN climate chief Yvo de Boer said that
negotiators face a “daunting task” balancing competing interests
from each country.
“Clearly in the process there will be winners
and there will be losers. But it is also clear that if we fail to
act then we will all be losers in the end,” de Boer told
reporters.
De Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change, said the Bangkok conference should
identify which areas needed work and set up new sessions or studies
to ensure a deal by the end of next year.
The United States, the main opponent of the
Kyoto Protocol, only agreed to the Bali deal after its delegates
were booed in the final session. Japan, which is far behind in its
Kyoto obligations to slash emissions by 6 percent by 2012 from 1990
levels, has proposed moving the base year for future cuts from 1990
to 2005—butting heads with the European Union.
Japan’s economy is steadily recovering from
recession, while in 1990 parts of the European Union were stagnating
in the Soviet bloc.
Chief US negotiator Harlan Watson called the
Japanese proposal “an interesting idea.”
“We’re looking into it. There are some
people to think that 1990 was advantageous to some parties,”
Watson told Agence France-Presse.
US President George W. Bush argues that Kyoto
was unfair by only requiring wealthy countries to slash greenhouse
gas emissions blamed for global warming.
Fast-growing developing economies such as China
and India argue that they cannot be expected to make the same type
of cuts as rich countries. They also want technology from rich
countries to help them curb emissions.
The European Union has pledged unilaterally to
cut emissions by at least 20 percent by 2020 compared with 1990. But
the 27-nation bloc has seen internal feuding on how to meet the
goal; coal-rich Poland, for example, wants to ensure a future for
fossil fuels.
“Every country comes at this now trying to
figure out what’s in their individual interests as well as the
global interests,” said Angela Anderson, global warming director
at the Washington-based Pew Environment Group. “There is a lot of
housekeeping to do at this meeting to figure out how they are going
to proceed.
-- AFP
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