UN Climate Debate Tries to Kick-Start New Treaty

The U.N. General Assembly's first session devoted exclusively to climate change closed with nations worried about the devastating impact of global warming now and on future generations, although few countries altered their well-known positions.

Still Britain's ambassador, Emyr Jones Parry, said of the session, which ended on Thursday, "The world is actually motivated on the issue in a way it wasn't earlier.

"Go back to January," he said. "Nobody here was interested in climate change and all people were concerned about this week was climate change."

The meeting, which spilled into a third unscheduled day so nearly 100 nations could speak, was a preview of a summit that U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for September 24, a day before the high-level annual Assembly session begins.

That session will be followed by U.N.-sponsored negotiations in December on the Indonesian island of Bali to see whether any progress can be made toward a new environmental treaty.

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol on the reduction of carbon emissions expires in 2012, possibly leaving the world without global warming regulations. That pact requires 35 industrial nations to cut emissions 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

Both Jones Parry and Japan's director general for global issues, Koji Tsuruoka, said the negotiations toward another treaty would be protracted and that developing nations would have to be included, not just industrial countries.

US, CHINA NEEDED

The United States and China, which together account for more than 40 percent of the world's pollution, would have to be part of the process, they said. Also needed are Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where deforestation "send more emissions than all the transport in the world," Jones Parry said.

The Bush administration has rejected firm targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, maintaining this would hurt the U.S. economy.

Tsuruoka said the Kyoto treaty had only reduced emissions from fossil fuels by about 3 percent, making it vital that goals of reducing greenhouse gases had to be diverse and flexible and consider each nation's economic and environmental concerns.

While the United States and China are apprehensive about economic growth, 37 small island states fear they may disappear under rising oceans as the Earth warms.

Said the Maldives U.N. ambassador, Mohamed Latheef: "In the 21st century our independence is threatened not by invading armies but by rising sea-levels-- not by global conflict but by global warming."

Global climate change has been blamed for droughts, floods, rising seas and intense storms.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said climate-warming emissions must be reduced by 50 percent by 2050. But without investment to curb climate change, emissions could rise by 50 percent instead, said Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is organizing the Bali conference.

De Boer said the world would probably invest $20 trillion over the next 20 to 25 years to meet the energy demand that goes with economic growth. To make these investments "green" would require an additional investment of perhaps $100 billion a year, he said.