Rich gave in at climate talks to protect Kyoto pact
Date: 04-Nov-02
Country: INDIA
Author: Y.P. Rajesh
Ministers and delegates from 185 countries ended 10 days of talks at a United Nations conference on climate change in the Indian capital late this week saying all parties had emerged winners.
The conference is probably the last major climate meeting before the 1997 Kyoto pact on cutting greenhouse gas emissions is expected to take effect next year.
Industrialised countries led by members of the European Union, Canada and Japan, which went along with a consensus on the declaration at the end of the conference, said the declaration "lacked vision and action for the future" as it failed to include any new commitments on poor countries to cut emissions.
The bickering and bargaining between rich and the poor countries stretched the conference beyond its schedule late into Friday night before the wealthier nations gave in.
In the end, the Delhi Declaration included technical issues such as methods to measure emission of greenhouse gases, cooperation between the rich and poor countries over climate change and said environmental policies should take economic and social development into account.
The European Union said it would have been "disastrous" if the conference had failed to agree on the declaration.
"It would have been a big failure not to have one (declaration)," Thomas Becker, deputy head of the E.U. delegation, told reporters.
"A failure would have been disastrous for the Russian ratification (of the Kyoto Protocol)."
Becker said the industrialised countries would, however, continue their efforts in the future to get at least some of the wealthier developing countries to make extra efforts to cut their greenhouse gas emissions.
"POOR DIDN'T BUDGE"
The Kyoto pact aims to cut greenhouse emissions from the developed world, which produce the bulk of the gases, to 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.
But it does not yet set emission restrictions for developing countries and some industrialised nations want them to do more.
The United States, the world's biggest air polluter, refuses to ratify the Kyoto deal, saying it would hurt the U.S. economy and wants major developing nations China and India included in the any emissions pact.
With the United States opposing it, a complex weighting system based on 1990 greenhouse pollution levels means the pact would founder without support from Russia.
Despite some domestic opposition, Moscow has backed the treaty and says it may ratify it as early as this year after a debate in Russian parliament.
Developed nations want some of the world's poorest but most populous countries, including India, to do more to cut their greenhouse pollution.
But developing countries say doing so could sabotage the very economic growth essential for them to advance to the stage that would allow them to cut output of greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide, that fuel global warming.
Indian Environment Minister T.R. Baalu, president of the conference, said poor countries "did not go back even an inch from their position".
"All the parties to the conference are winners," Baalu told a news conference. "There are no losers as far as the Delhi Declaration is concerned."
