UN: The UN's latest climate change summit ended in New Delhi at the weekend with a ministerial declaration calling for early ratification of the Kyoto Protocol and priority measures to help poorer countries adapt to increasingly extreme weather conditions.
The declaration, adopted by representatives of 170 countries, urged governments to promote less polluting energy and other innovative technologies and to increase substantially renewable energy resources with the aim of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
One of the conference's biggest achievements was to make the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) fully operational. The CDM is intended to channel private-sector investment into emissions-reduction projects in developing countries. According to a UN statement, it will promote sustainable development in these countries while allowing developed countries to claim credits against their own greenhouse gas emissions in order to meet the Kyoto reduction targets. Ms Joke Waller-Hunter, executive secretary of the UN Convention on Climate Change, said the developed countries have only 10 years to meet their Kyoto targets "and the evidence today is that most of them still have a great deal of work to do".
The Kyoto Protocol, expected to enter into force next year, commits developed countries to reduce their overall emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by an average of 5 per cent on 1990 levels during the period 2008-2012. The Protocol needs to be ratified by 55 governments, including developed countries representing at least 55 per cent of that group's 1990 CO2 emissions. So far, it has been ratified by developed countries accounting for 37.4 per cent of those emissions. Poland and South Korea announced their ratification at the New Delhi conference. The Russian Federation and other countries - including Canada and Japan - are expected to ratify in the near future, pushing the figure over the required 55 per cent threshold.
The conference also concluded three years of work on the procedures for reporting emissions data to ensure that these are comparable and credible - vital for safeguarding the integrity of the Kyoto agreement and promoting compliance with its emissions targets.
But the US, which last year decided to renege on Kyoto, and other oil-producing countries such as Saudi Arabia were accused of obstructing attempts by EU countries and environmental groups to map out a path towards a safer, more equitable and sustainable world.
Mr Pat Finnegan, of Grian, an Irish climate change action group, said the "rather weak" outcome had left "the safety of both future negotiations and the world's climate largely as uncertain as they were two weeks ago when the conference opened".
However, although both the US and Saudi Arabia had attempted to "throw sand in the gearbox", he said the ministerial declaration was sufficiently bland to ensure that the international effort to deal with climate change "still managed to stay on the rails".
The 8th Conference of the Parties to the Climate Change Convention was attended by 5,000 participants. The next conference is in Italy in December, 2003.
