POZNAN, Poland: UN climate talks open in Poland on Monday overshadowed by a global economic slowdown but with UN praise for "ambitious" goals by US President-elect Barack Obama for fighting global warming.
About 10,600 delegates from 186 governments, businesses and environmental groups meet in Poznan for the Dec 1-12 talks halfway through a two-year push to agree a new climate treaty in Copenhagen at the end of 2009 to succeed the Kyoto Protocol.
"It will be an incredible challenge" to reach such a complex accord within a year when the world is struggling with the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, said Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Denmark's Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen will be among speakers at an opening ceremony on Monday, along with UN experts. WWF and Greenpeace activists plan protests outside the conference center to urge more action.
De Boer praised Obama for saying that he would seek to cut U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases back to 1990 levels by 2020 as part of global action to avert more heatwaves, floods, droughts, more powerful storms and rising seas.
"It's ambitious," de Boer said of the target, speaking at a news conference on the eve of the talks. A rising US population made the goal hard to reach.
US emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels in factories, power plants and cars, are about 14 percent above 1990 levels. President George W. Bush's policies foresee a peak only in 2025.
"I expect Senator Obama to do what he plans to do: show leadership at the national level," de Boer said.
Bush did not ratify Kyoto, saying it would be too costly and excluded targets for developing nations such as China and India. Had Washington ratified, it would have had to cut by seven percent below 1990 levels by 2012.
De Boer said the economic slowdown was an opportunity to re-design the world economy but warned governments against making "cheap and dirty" choices of investing in high-polluting coal-fired power plants.
"We must focus on the opportunities for green growth," he said.
In Europe, economic slowdown has exposed doubts about the costs of an EU goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.
UN talks host Poland, which gets 93 percent of its electricity from coal, and Italy are leading a drive for concessions in a package meant to be agreed at a December 11-12 summit of EU leaders in Brussels.
The talks in Poland will review new ideas for combating global warming, such as handing credits to tropical nations for preserving forests. And China, for instance, is suggesting that developed nations should give up to 1 percent of their gross national product in aid to help the poor switch from fossil fuels.
