Yahoo News 25 Apr 10;
CAPE TOWN (AFP) – Four major developing countries meeting in South Africa on Sunday called for a global, legally binding agreement on climate change to be finalised by next year at the latest.
Environment ministers from Brazil, South Africa, India and China met in Cape Town to discuss on how to speed up a process of finalising a global agreement that would require rich nations to cut carbon emissions and reduce global warming.
"Ministers felt that a legally binding outcome should be concluded at Cancun, Mexico in 2010, or at the latest in South Africa by 2011," ministers from the developing world's powerhouses said in a joint statement, referring to United Nations climate talks.
The Copenhagen meeting, held last year and aimed at thrashing out a new climate treaty to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, was widely criticized for failing to produce a new treaty to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
"Developing countries strongly support international legally binding agreements, as the lack of such agreements hurts developing countries more than developed countries," the statement said.
The ministers also called for developed nations to fast track the release of a 10-billion-dollar fund to help poor countries "to develop, test and demonstrate practical implementation approaches to both adaptation and mitigation."
Meanwhile, the environmental lobby group Greenpeace urged the ministers to seize climate leadership in the run-up to the next UN Climate summit in Cancun, Mexico, at the end of the year and help break the current deadlock in the climate negotiations.
"Greenpeace urges the governments gathered in Cape Town to take the opportunity to make a clear and unanimous call for a fair, ambitious and legally binding deal to avert catastrophic climate change," said Greenpeace Africa political advisor Themba Linden in a statement.
