China says Kyoto pact benefits both rich and poor
Date: 18-Jan-02
Country: CHINA
Author: Jonathan Ansfield
The appeal came at a meeting of European and Asian environmental ministers, who are seeking to forge ahead with the Kyoto accord this year even without the United States, which abandoned the accord last March amid a chorus of criticism.
"China hopes all parties will continue to work hard to push for the Kyoto Protocol to go into effect at the earliest possible date," State Environmental Protection Administration Director Xie Zhenhua told the ministers in Beijing.
China would "actively explore" financial and technical aid deals under the accord's "Clean Development Mechanism", which allows industrialised nations to meet pollution control targets through projects in the developing world, Xie said.
"The Clean Development Mechanism...will spur sustainable development and provide win-win opportunities," he said.
The Kyoto pact aims to reduce gas emissions from factory smokestacks and exhaust pipes that many scientists say gather in the atmosphere trapping heat - the so-called greenhouse effect.
The 1997 pact was put in jeopardy last March when U.S. President George W. Bush backed out of the agreement, saying it would hurt the U.S. economy and reap only slim benefits.
But a last-ditch deal reached by environment and energy ministers from around the world in Morocco in November paved the way for bringing the pact into force by late this year even without the United States, the planet's biggest polluter.
Japan, said to hold the swing vote in bringing it into force, plans to submit legislation to ratify the pact at a parliament session this month.
The pact commits the world's industrialised countries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions, particularly carbon dioxide, by an average of five percent of 1990 levels by late 2002.
KYOTO'S MUTUAL INCENTIVES
China - which spews an estimated 11 percent of the world's carbon emissions into the atmosphere, compared to 18 percent by the United States - is among a large group of developing nations not required to meet the emissions caps before 2012.
The bilateral projects Beijing planned to explore under Kyoto in the future carried mutual incentives for China and its industrialised partners, according to Xie.
"The Clean Development Mechanism can allow developed nations to realise part of their pledge to reduce emissions at a price far lower than their domestic cost," he said.
Premier Zhu Rongji has spearheaded Beijing's public relations campaign to balance the economic juggernaut's breakneck growth with sound environmental policy, and awareness of the country's sooty skies and sludge-filled rivers has surged.
The State Council, or cabinet, last week approved a plan to spend 65 billion yuan ($7.85 billion) on cleaning up and set strict control targets in the five years to 2005.
Scepticism abounds over China's ability to transform its industrial polluters like illegal, unsafe coal mines that feed impoverished migrants and their rural families.
While Asia's star economy has embraced Kyoto as an instrument to bolster its competitiveness, China has backed off mechanisms that could cap pollutant levels and constrain growth.
Developing countries like China will have to adopt some form of emissions controls if they want to take part in the CDM projects, a top Japanese official attending the talks said.
"There has been some apprehension and scepticism if China would be interested in that kind of mechanism," said Seiji Morimoto, an official at Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
"But today the reaction by the Chinese side was rather positive and we on the whole felt very impressed," he said.
Since the U.S. withdrawal, having Japan - the world's second biggest economy and a major polluter - on board was seen as essential to bring the pact into force.
Morimoto said Tokyo's hopes to ratify the pact at a parliamentary session which opens next week were on track.
"Hopefully we will be able to finish all the necessary procedures in due course," he
