Aminu Abubakar, Yahoo News 21 Aug 08;
Time is running out in the fight against global warming, the UN's top climate change official warned as a new round of UN talks got started here Thursday.
"There is little time left to get a solid negotiating text on the table. Clearly the clock is ticking," said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
"People in a burning house cannot afford to lose time in an argument," he said, citing an Ashanti proverb.
The Accra gathering must strive to "reach agreement on the rules and tools" that developed countries will use to cut greenhouse gas emissions, he told more than 1,600 delegates from 160 nations.
Ghana's President John Kufuor echoed the sense of urgency in his opening remarks, noting that his country was already suffering the consequences of global warming.
Rainfall in Ghana has decreased by 20 percent in three decades, and 1,000 square kilometres (400 square miles) of fertile agricultural land in the upper Volta Delta will be lost to rising sea levels and flooding if temperatures rise at their current pace, he said.
The expert-level meeting, which runs through August 27, is the third UN climate change conference since nations committed to adopting a binding climate accord no later than December 2009.
It is the last meeting ahead of a ministerial summit in Poznan, Poland in December where rich countries will be under intense pressure to nail down near-term commitments for reducing greenhouse gases.
The Group of Eight industrialised powers pledged to halve emissions by 2050, but critics say intermediate goals are needed.
"The real political commitment is short- and medium-term," Connie Hedegaard, the Danish Minister for Climate and Energy, told delegates.
"We have to speed up the pace. The negotiations here in Accra must deliver concrete results" about what technologies will be used to cut emissions, she said.
Africa is arguably the continent most vulnerable to the potential ravages of climate change, which range from extreme drought to violent storms to rising sea levels.
De Boer challenged delegates to be "ambitious," and said if they failed Africa would continue, in terms of climate change, to be the "forgotten continent".
He insisted that rich countries step up financial assistance to help Africa with global warming.
African produces the fewest emissions, he pointed out, but will likely well pay the heaviest price.
De Boer and Kufuor underlined the threat of deforestation, which is destroying one of nature's most powerful natural buffers against global warming.
The world's forests -- which are disappearing at a rate of about 30 million hectares (74 million acres) per year -- soak up more than 20 percent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
"Governments need to focus on reducing emissions caused by deforestation and forest degradation," and on how to reward countries that protect forests, said de Boer.
The problem is particularly acute in Amazonia, central Africa and Indonesia, experts note.
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF), an environmental group, called on the Accra meeting to adopt the Olympic motto of "faster, higher, stronger."
"Progress on substance ... must be swifter, the level of ambition by both developed and developing countries higher, and the measures to reduce CO2 (carbon dioxide) emissions stronger," said Kim Carstensen, director of the WWF's Global Climate Change Initiative.
UN Ghana Climate Talks Start, Time Said Short
Alister Doyle, PlanetArk 22 Aug 08;
ACCRA - Time is running short to agree a new UN climate treaty that will need billions of dollars a year to help the poor cope with global warming, host Ghana told the start of 160-nation UN climate talks on Thursday.
"The clock is ticking," Ghanaian President John Kufuor told the Aug. 21-27 talks in Accra, meant to work on details of a UN deal to combat global warming to be agreed in Copenhagen at the end of 2009.
"We need more than rhetoric to make progress in the next 12 to 18 months," he told 1,000 delegates in a conference hall in Accra. The talks are the third this year of a series of eight UN sessions due to end with a treaty in Copenhagen.
Kufuor said there were damaging signs of climate change in Ghana -- rainfall had decreased by 20 percent in the past 30 years, while up to 1,000 square km (386 sq mile) of land was at risk in the Volta Delta due to sea level rises and floods.
"Climate change makes development harder and more expensive," he said.
He backed a UN pact under which poor nations would agree to slow the rise of their emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, while seeking to curb poverty in return for a package from rich nations that included funding and clean technology.
Estimates of the costs of adapting to a changing climate, such as flood prevention, drought-resistant crops or defences against rising seas "differ enormously but run to tens of billions of dollars per year", he said.
And he said global warming was not only a problem for poor nations. "The entire human race is under threat, no matter its geographical location," he said.
FOOD PRICES
Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat, also urged delegates to speed up talks after scant progress in previous meetings in Bangkok and Bonn in 2008 against a backdrop of slowing economic growth and high food and fuel prices.
"Time is short ... negotiations need to speed up," he said. He said Africa had been the "forgotten continent" in the climate debate and among the most vulnerable, with up to 250 million people threatened by water shortages by 2020.
Later, developing nations criticised proposals led by Japan for goals for emissions of greenhouse gases from industrial sectors such as steel, aluminium or power generation as part of a new deal to succeed the existing Kyoto Protocol.
"We feel extremely uncomfortable with the kind of sectoral approaches that are being discussed," Indian delegate Ajay Mathur said.
Developing nations fear that sectoral benchmarks, for instance the amount of energy needed to produce a tonne of steel or cement, could be a backdoor way for rich nations to impose trade barriers on their less efficient industries.
Japan's delegate Jun Arima played down the worries, saying that sectoral goals were meant to highlight opportunities for greater efficiency. "We are not looking for a common target for the Indian steel sector and the Japanese steel sector," he said.
The Accra talks will look at ways to broaden the current Kyoto Protocol, which binds 37 developed nations to cut emissions by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12.
Delegates will also look at new mechanisms, such as credits to slow the rate of tropical deforestation. Burning of forests contributes up to about 20 percent of man-made greenhouse gases.
(Editing by Mike Collett-White/Tony Austin)
