By DPA
New York : World leaders and ministers from more than 150 countries will gather Monday at the United Nations to lay out their positions on climate change and kick off talks on how to tackle the issue in the coming decades.
For the UN, the meeting is all about gaining political momentum ahead of a critical December summit in Bali, Indonesia, where UN and government negotiators hope to map out a plan for a post-Kyoto world.
The Kyoto Protocols went into effect in 2005, placing targets on the 36 signatory countries to cut carbon-dioxide emissions – the chief contributor to global warming. Those 36 countries did not include the US – the world’s biggest polluter – or any developing countries.
The Kyoto treaty expires in 2012, and to have any real impact, a post-Kyoto deal must bring major holdouts including China and India into the fold, environmentalists say.
“We need to find a way to bring the US and emerging economies into the system,” Eileen Claussen, president of the non-partisan Pew Centre on Global Climate Change, told reporters in a pre-summit briefing.
Monday’s gathering in New York, one day before leaders address the annual opening of the General Assembly, will not bring a solution to global warming much closer.
It is billed simply as an informal discussion, initiated by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who has made combating climate change one of the organization’s top priorities since he took over in January.
Each leader is to speak for about five minutes in one of four parallel events tackling different facets of the issue. Ban is scheduled to sum up at the end.
Still, even environmentalists view the gathering as significant, given the unprecedented number of world leaders – about 80 – who are to take up the issue at the same time.
Elliot Diringer, Pew’s director of international strategies, said that the aim of the UN meeting was to “send a very strong and high-level political signal” that action on global warming is needed, and soon.
The groundwork has been set all year, amid a flurry of activity on the world stage regarding climate change. Both the G8 summit of industrialized nations in June and a gathering of Asia-Pacific nations last month put global warming at the top of their agenda.
Out of the G8 summit came a conference proposed by US President George W. Bush, set for Thursday and Friday in Washington, where leaders and representatives of 17 countries among the world’s biggest emitters are to discuss future action.
All of these meetings are designed to build momentum ahead of Bali, where the UN is pressing countries to start formal talks for a post-Kyoto treaty. The UN and member states have set the end of 2009 as the deadline for a final deal, to allow time for countries to ratify a treaty before Kyoto expires at the end of 2012.
For scientists and environmentalists, time is running out, and any political backlog risks postponing serious action until it’s too late.
Three UN-backed reports, compiled by hundreds of the world’s scientists, earlier this year laid out the dire costs and effects of climate change – warning that global warming was “unequivocal” and that the world had about eight years left to respond.
The upside of the reports – the first such survey since 2001 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – was that only about 0.1 percent of the world’s gross domestic product would be required each year to invest in clean-industry alternatives.
According to Phillip Clapp of the National Environment Trust, Monday is “the beginning, the kick-off” event that will eventually lead to that elusive, post-Kyoto agreement.