U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, trying
to revive long-stalled climate talks, told world environment
ministers on Tuesday he is "deeply concerned" that many years of
negotiation have proven largely fruitless.
"The pace of human-induced climate change is accelerating. We
need results now, results that curb global greenhouse emissions,"
Ban declared at the opening of high-level talks at the annual U.N.
climate conference.
In the two-week session's final days, environment ministers will
seek agreement on knotty side issues in coping with global warming,
but once more the U.N. climate treaty's 193 parties will fail at
Cancun to produce a sweeping deal to slash greenhouse gas emissions
and control climate change.
"I am deeply concerned that our efforts so far have been
insufficient," the U.N. chief told delegates.
"Nature will not wait while we negotiate," he said. "Science
warns that the window of opportunity to prevent uncontrolled climate
change will soon close."
U.N. environment chief, Achim Steiner, reminded the conference
that countries' current, voluntary pledges to reduce emissions
would, at best, offer the world limited protection against serious
damage from shifts in climate.
Another reminder came from the mountains of south Asia: In a new
report, experts said people's lives and livelihoods are at "high
risk" as warming melts Himalayan glaciers, sending floods crashing
down from overloaded mountain lakes and depriving farmers of steady
water sources.
Low-lying Pacific island states, in particular, are losing
shoreline to rising seas, expanding from heat and the runoff of
melting land ice. Following Ban to the podium, President Marcus
Stephen of Nauru, one of those states, said the reality of climate
change has been lost in scientific, economic and technical jargon.
"Without bold action, it will be left to our children to come up
with the words to convey the tragedy of losing our homelands when it
didn't have to be this way," he said.
Despite such evidence of growing impacts, and scientists'
warnings that temperatures will rise sharply in this century,
nations have made little progress over the past decade toward a new
global pact on emissions cuts to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
The Republican rebound in Washington promises to delay action even
further.
Instead, environment ministers will focus on secondary tools for
confronting global warming, laying the groundwork, for example, for
a "green fund" of $100 billion a year by 2020.
Financed by richer nations, the fund would support poorer nations
in converting to cleaner energy sources and in adapting to a
shifting climate that may damage people's health, agriculture and
economies in general.
Negotiators also hope to agree on a mechanism giving poorer
countries' easier access to te patented green technology of
advanced countries, and on pinning down more elements of a complex
plan to compensate developing nations for protecting their
climate-friendly forests.
"Some important decisions are ripe for adoption, on protecting
forests, on climate adaptation, technology and some elementsof
finance," Ban told reporters.
He urged governments "to be flexible and to negotiate in a
spirit of compromise and common sense for the good of all the
peoples."
Year after year at these U.N. sessions, activists frustrated by
their slow pace have rallied in protest. On Tuesday, hundreds
marched rom downtown Cancun toward the heavily guarded beach resort
area where the conference is taking place. About a dozen protesters
managed to get inside the conference complex, marching briefly
through a meeting hall before being escorted away by security
guards.
High-level guidance from the environment minisers may be needed
most in the coming days' debates over limited gestures proposed on
emissions reductions.
The U.S. has long refused to join the rest of the industrialized
world in the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 add-on to the climate treaty
that mandates modest emissions reductions by richer nations, and
whos commitments expire in 2012. The U.S. complained Kyoto would
hurt its economy and should have mandated actions as well by such
emerging economies as China and India.
Last month's election of a Republican majority in the U.S. House
of Representatives all but rules out for at least two years U.S.
legislationto cap carbon dioxide and other global-warming gases
emitted by industry, vehicles and agriculture. Such American action
is deemed essential to winning a new global pact on emissions.
China and other poorer, growing nations, have rejected calls that
they submit to Kyoto-style legally binding commitments - nt to
reduce emissions, but to cut back on emissions growth. Their first
obligation, these governments say, is to lift their people from
poverty, and not potentially hobble their economies.
In a nonbinding Copenhagen Accord emerging from last December's
climate summit in the Danish capital, the U.S. and otr industrial
nations announced targets for reducing emissions by 2020, and China
and some other developing nations set goals, also voluntary, for
cutting back on emissions growth.
That accord was not accepted by all treaty parties. Now many
negotiators want to have the voluntary targets "anchored" more
ormally in a final Cancun document - but how, with what wording and
form of commitment, will be subject to backroom haggling in the
coming days.
The glacier report, issued here by the U.N. Environment Program
and glacier researchers, said that since the early 1980s, "the rate
of ice loss has increased substantially in many regions, concurrent
with an increase in global mean air temperatures."
Glaciers in southern South America and Alaska's coastal mountains
have been losing mass faster and for longer than glaciers elsewhere
in the world, it said.
The experts said the incidence of "glacial lake outburst
floods" has grown over the past 40 years, accounting for some of
the 5,000 Asian deaths each year from flash floods. More broadly,
the swift depletion of glacial waters may leave tens of thousands of
farmers without irrigation water.
