By Xinhua
Jakarta : Finance ministers from across the world will hold a two-day meeting in conjunction with the international conference on climate change next month in Indonesia’s resort island of Bali.
They will discuss financial issues and policies to address the concern of climate change, Indonesian Finance Minister Mulyani Indrawati said Thursday.
The ministers will meet on Dec 10-11 to convince the governments of the respective countries to agree on a “common objective on the financial issues of climate change”, leading to a more appropriate policy for sustainable development and support for the global carbon trading market, the minister said.
“This is important because many developing countries are uneasy about the issue of climate change,” Indrawati was quoted by a local newspaper Jakarta Post as saying.
“For many countries that are trying to improve their economies with limited resources, the climate change issue is an additional obstacle to their development. We therefore expect the meeting to provide a positive discussion to sort out the differences between the needs of developing and the developed countries.”
In an assessment released earlier this year, the UN Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change said that efforts to keep global carbon dioxide levels at a sustainable level would cost three percent of global gross domestic product (GDP) and reduce average annual GDP growth rates by 0.12 percent.