Uphill Battle Marks New Round of Climate Talks in Germany Amid Concern by Poorer Nations

June 2, 2008 — -- Poor countries appealed to a 162-nation climate conference Monday to move faster on an agreement to rein in global warming, saying they already are suffering from floods and cyclones brought on by rising temperatures.

The appeal came at the opening of a two-week meeting where the 2,000 delegates intend to start tackling the details of a new climate change agreement that is to take effect after 2012.

"We are concerned over the slow progress of the last two years," said Amjad Abdulla of the Maldives, speaking for a group known as the Least Developed Countries.

Climate change "for us is not a distant reality, but a present reality," he said. The recent cyclones that have battered Myanmar and Bangladesh "should be a wake-up call to all of us."

The Bonn meeting builds on a landmark accord reached last December on the Indonesian island of Bali. For the first time, the United States, China and India had indicated they would join a coordinated effort to control the carbon emissions blamed for global warming.

In Bali, delegates agreed to conclude a new climate change treaty by December 2009. They later adopted a negotiating timetable at another conference in Bangkok.

"We have to roll our sleeves up and get down to work," Yvo de Boer, the U.N.'s top climate change official, said in an interview Sunday.

Scientists say the world's carbon emissions must peak within the next 10 to 15 years and then fall by half by mid-century to avoid potentially catastrophic changes in weather patterns, a rise in sea levels that would threaten coastal cities and the mass extinction of plants and animals.

The new climate change pact will succeed the first phase of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which requires 37 industrialized nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

Delegates in Bonn will begin work on how to help developing countries adapt to anticipated changes in their climate, on transferring new technologies to help them avoid hefty carbon emissions as they expand their economies, and on how to raise the trillions of dollars required over the next decades to curb climate change.

Abdulla and other developing country delegates again called on the industrial countries to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 20 to 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020. Several delegations proposed including international aviation and shipping in a new climate change regime, to encourage emission reductions from these two key sectors.

No one expects answers by the end of the Bonn conference. But de Boer said he hopes the meeting will "take things to the next level," with the discussions crystalizing ideas.

Delegates say the new pact must be adopted at a critical meeting in Copenhagen in December 2009 to give countries time for ratification it so it can smoothly succeed the terms set in Kyoto that expire in 2012.

"We are in serious danger of slipping behind," said Kim Carstensen, director of the Global Climate Initiative of WWW International, known in the United States as the World Wildlife Fund. "We need to get serious proposals on the table."