UPDATE - G8 starts environment talks, under fire on Kyoto
Date: 15-Apr-02
Country: CANADA
Author: David Ljunggren
The Group of Eight meeting is trying to hammer out a workable agenda for a summit on sustainable development in Johannesburg this August, which will look at improving the living conditions of the world's poorest people by ensuring access to clean water and cheap energy.
Canadian Environment Minister David Anderson told the meeting in the Rocky Mountain resort of Banff that the Johannesburg summit should focus more on using trade and the private sector to help poorer countries, something he called the "new reality" of development aid.
Activists say that will mean sacrificing the environment to benefit corporate interests. But British Environment Minister Margaret Beckett dismissed their concerns.
"That's absolute rubbish. It is absolutely essential that we get the private sector involved, not least because sustainable development cannot possibly work if it's only being delivered by governments or by public sector bodies," she told reporters after the end of the first day of talks.
Anderson said that big corporations were an important partner in the field of development aid because they had significant resources and knew they stood to lose money if they invested in projects which were environmentally unsustainable.
Green groups are outraged that the G8 meeting will not formally be discussing global warming and Kyoto protocol on climate change, which the United States abandoned last year.
The ministers will instead raise the topic at an informal breakfast on Sunday.
"We have virtually no mention of one of the most important issues facing the planet at the moment, the threat of climate change," said Benedict Southworth, the climate change director of Greenpeace International.
"Kyoto is such an important issue that it has to be on the formal agenda, it has to be in the formal (closing) statement," he added, saying the latest draft G8 statement produced by Canada did not even mention the word Kyoto.
Greenpeace accuses Ottawa of dragging its feet on ratifying Kyoto, which would oblige Canada to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 6 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. As of 1999, Canada's emissions were already 15 percent higher than the 1990 levels, suggesting a huge task to meet that goal.
Ottawa, under increasing pressure from energy producers and some of Canada's powerful provinces to follow the U.S. lead and ditch Kyoto, has dropped all talk of ratifying the protocol this year and wants more nationwide consultations.
Greenpeace and others say they fear Canada will eventually abandon Kyoto and join the United States, which has made clear it will not change its mind.
U.S. delegates predict U.S. Environmental Protection Agency head Christine Todd Whitman came under pressure on climate change during a series of bilateral meetings over the weekend.
Bush has proposed setting up a system of voluntary emissions reductions by U.S. industry, an idea which Beckett said had generated "some disappointment and concern" because they did not go far enough.
Anderson said there were plenty of other chances to discuss climate change internationally and said the topic should not be allowed to blot out discussions on important topics such as the need for sustainable development.
"There's a child that dies somewhere in the world every 10 seconds from a water-borne disease. I think it's important for us to discuss at Johannesburg the issues of the relationship between children's health and the environment," he said.
But activists such as Jeff Fissot, executive director of the Yellowstone-to-Yukon conservation initiative, said Kyoto was a crucial test of the international community's will to really deal with environmental problems.
"If one cannot address the Kyoto issue after having made commitments around the world to do so then it certainly makes other commitments ring rather hollow," he said.
The G8 groups Canada, the United States, Britain, Russia, France, Germany, Italy and Japan.