Global Climate Deal Best Option, But Road Rough: U.N.

Jon Herskovitz, PlanetArk 23 Apr 10;

The head of the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) maintained a global climate treaty was better than a range of small-scale agreements, but said it was unlikely a deal to combat global warming would be reached this year.

The prospect of a global climate treaty is fading as the world's top two carbon emitters, China and the United States, avoid legally binding action. Experts say a shift to a less ambitious goal might help.

"The argument or suggestion that the world would be better off if we somehow found lots of little packages and agreed to them and found out how they fit together is not to me a viable scenario," Achim Steiner, UNEP executive director, said on Thursday in an interview with Reuters.

Annual U.N. climate meetings have failed to achieve any major breakthrough since signing the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. The present round of that pact expires in 2012.

The next annual meeting of environment ministers will be in Cancun, Mexico in November and December.

"We might not be able to conclude the one big deal in the next conference but what we must produce is some concrete results that clearly take us toward a global framework for action," Steiner said on the sidelines of the Business for the Environment meeting in Seoul.

Experts note a less formal deal, outside a legal framework, may now emerge, building on the actions of individual nations.

More than 100 countries have backed a non-binding Copenhagen Accord to mobilize $30 billion in climate aid from 2010-2012 to help poor nations face the impacts of climate change, underscoring what could be agreed outside a legal framework.

"What will be critical for Cancun is that the financial pledges that are part of the accord begin to be realized and that people see real money going to real projects," Steiner said.

"Do not write Cancun off."

Steiner also threw his support behind the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has been attacked by skeptics after it published a report with errors in global warming forecasts.

The U.N. launched a review of the panel last month after the IPCC acknowledged in January its report had exaggerated the pace of Himalayan glacier melting and overstated how much of the Netherlands is below sea level.

"The premise that the integrity of the IPCC has been compromised is something that I reject," he said.

The IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, and produces the main scientific document driving global efforts to agree to a more ambitious climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol.

"It will remain the world's best resource on trying to appreciate the complex and continuously evolving state of our knowledge of global warming," he said.

(Editing by Jeremy Laurence)