Environment ministers from 13 nations responsible for most of the world’s greenhouse-gas pollution began a two-day meeting near Berlin on Friday, seeking a way forward in the global-warming crisis.
The meeting at the Cecilienhof chateau — the venue of the 1945 Potsdam agreement that reshaped Europe — gathers the Group of Eight (G8) countries and five major developing nations: Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa.
Together, their economies account for more than two-thirds of the world’s carbon emissions, the invisible gases that trap heat from the Sun and threaten havoc with the planet’s delicate climate system.
German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel said the goal was to find common ground ahead of a G8 plus Five summit in June in the Baltic resort of Heiligendamm.
”It’s not a negotiation today [Friday], it’s only a discussion about two issues, biodiversity and climate change, that we will prepare for the G8 summit,” Gabriel told reporters.
”The last treaty that we had in this building was a little bit complicated — we don’t want to have do that today,” he quipped.
The Earth’s surface temperatures have been steadily rising for the last few decades, driven by the release of billions of tonnes of carbon gases from burning fossil fuels.
The only worldwide pact for reducing these dangerous emissions is the United Nation’s Kyoto Protocol.
The treaty runs out in 2012 but it will deliver just a tiny cut of a few percentage points compared with 1990.
And that reduction will apply only to industrialised countries, not big developing ones, which do not have binding, targeted pledges under the present format and are now becoming hefty polluters in their own right.
Worse still, Kyoto has been virtually crippled by a walkout by the United States, which by itself accounts for nearly a quarter of world pollution.
Negotiations are under way for Kyoto’s post-2012 format.
But for it to provide the massive cuts that experts are demanding, it needs to coax an agreement from the oil-addicted US.
And it must secure tough commitments from big developing countries, which fear their dash for growth could be wrecked by the cost of switching to cleaner, more fuel-efficient technology.
The Potsdam meeting is the first chance to see whether the US and the Big Five developing countries are spurred into concessions by the European Union’s new offer on greenhouse-gas cuts.
At a summit last week, the 27-nation EU pledged to cut its own greenhouse-gas emissions by 20% by 2020 and deepen it to 30 % if ”international partners” follow suit.
British Environment Minister David Miliband, who last week unveiled the most ambitious national legal blueprint for curbing greenhouse gases, said the EU’s offer was ”a significant attempt to break the logjam”.
”I hope there will be some new thinking, some new ideas, some openness, because that is what the G8 plus Five process is designed to contribute,” he told reporters.
Miliband hoped the US would join a global emissions reduction deal as it could economically benefit from it.
He said developing countries also realised that, even if they were least to blame for the greenhouse-gas problem, they were badly exposed to it and also had to contribute to fixing it.
”[The] choice is whether they have a high-carbon path of development, repeating the mistakes of the industrialised countries, or whether they are helped to choose a low-carbon path of development.”
And rich countries had to help them choose the latter, he said.
Meanwhile, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported on Thursday that the Earth had its warmest December to February period since records began 128 years ago.
A record warm January worldwide pushed average temperatures in December to February to 0,72 degrees Celsius above normal for the 20th century.
In January, the UN’S Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change pointed to loss of alpine glaciers and snow cover, retreating permafrost and shifting rainfall patterns as signs that global warming had started to interfere with the climate.
By 2100, global average surface temperatures could rise by between 1,1 and 6,4 degrees Celsius. — Sapa-AFP