UNGA discusses climate change

The Economic Times, , Friday, August 03, 2007
Correspondent : Staff Reporter
UNITED NATIONS: The first-ever UN General Assembly meeting devoted exclusively to climate change needed an extra day to hear speakers from nations worried about the impact of global warming and impatient for international action.

Calling climate change "the most pressing and important international issue of our time," Britain's UN Ambassador Emyr Jones Parry said "the world is actually motivated on the issue in a way it wasn't" in January - "and the political momentum has to just grow and grow."

"Never has the challenge we face from climate change been so well understood, or so evident. We face a shared dilemma, developed and developing countries alike. Collective international action by us all ... is imperative. It is not a choice," Jones Parry said yesterday.

Deciding on that action will likely take several years of intense and difficult negotiations, which are expected to start at a December meeting on the Indonesian island of Bali. It will focus on a replacement for the Kyoto protocol, which requires 35 industrial nations to cut their global-warming emissions 5 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012, when the accord expires.

The question of what to do has become increasingly complex because of competing environmental, economic and energy concerns from countries with different priorities.

The United States, the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, is not a party to the Kyoto agreement and large developing countries such as China, the second-largest emitter, India and Brazil are exempt from its obligations.

 
SOURCE : The Economic Times, Friday, August 3, 2007
 


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