Don't let global warming talks unravel, warns UN official
Copyright © 2000 AFP
September 11, 2000
LYON, France, Sept 11 (AFP) - Ministerial talks aimed at defusing the threat of global warming resumed here Monday to a grim warning of the consequences if the process were delayed for lack of time or scaled back because of national squabbles.
The UN's pointman, Michael Zammit Cutajar, noted that just two months remained for building the complex machinery sketched in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which commits wealthy countries to trimming emissions of fossil-fuel gases by 2008-2012 compared to their 1990 levels.
"The passage of time since Kyoto is weighing on the Protocol negotiations. Economic trends since then have made certain emission targets more difficult than they seemed in 1997," said Cutajar, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC).
"And the time to put in place the legislation, the institutions and the investments necessary to shoot for these targets is becoming uncomfortably short."
Kyoto is the most ambitious environmental treaty ever attempted -- and it has engendered political wrangling on a similar scale.
Framed to take effect in 2002, its revolutionary tools include a market to trade in quotas of carbon gases and the transfer of "clean" technology to emerging countries so that they do not follow developed countries down the path of carbon pollution.
Cutajar said time was now "uncomfortably short" for resolving some of the protocol's thorniest technical issues, and there were now voices from outside the forum who clamoured for the protocol to be slimmed down or its deadline postponed.
"In my view, any attempt to renegotiate part of the Kyoto deal would lead to the whole deal breaking down. It would take years to start building again. Work must go ahead within the parameters set in Kyoto," he said.
Kyoto was negotiated against a backdrop of mounting scientific evidence that spiralling consumption of oil, coal and gas is pumping billions of tonnes of carbon-based gas into the atmosphere, acting as an invisible shroud enveloping the Earth.
As a consequence, heat from the Sun is prevented from being radiated safely back into space, causing a "greenhouse effect" in which the air temperature is steadily rising.
Projections about the exact rise -- and the effect it will have -- remain unclear. But all scenarios see a rise in sea levels as the polar ice caps shrink and the oceans expand through heat, with potential for wreaking changes in climate.
Ministers of signatories to the Protocol are meeting in Lyon this week to try to hammer out the accord's mechanisms, following six days of informal talks that sought to bridge a wide gulf between the United States and the European Union (EU).
Taking the podium just after Cutajar, French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, whose countries chairs the EU until the end of the year, warned that industrialised countries "must assume their responsibilities."
Global warming could only be braked, not reversed, but if polluters could stave off an additional warming of two degrees Celsius (4.25 deg. Fahrenheit) over the next century, "the survival of future generations may depend on it."
He indicated that the EU would resist US demands for there to be a generous definition of the effects of forests, which soak up carbon dioxide and can therefore be used to offset national CO2 quotas.
And he signalled that the EU would insist on a rigorous system to ensure countries did not cheat on their commitments.
Japan and Australia are against an intrusive or punitive compliance regime, although the United States, which was initially against, is now moving towards the EU position, delegation sources said.
Annie Petsonk, a lawyer with a moderate US ecology group, Environmental Defense, said she expected the final round of talks, taking place in The Hague from November 13-24, would fail to wrap everything up.
"Climate change has taken a very long time to develop, and it will take a long time for solutions to develop," she said. "Kyoto is a work in progress. It will go on beyond The Hague."