Differences between the United States and other Group of Eight (G8) industrialised countries were highlighted on the closing day of an environment ministers’ conference in Potsdam near Berlin that ended on Saturday.
German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel said the US, by contrast with other members of the G8, did not want to participate in paying financial compensation to developing countries for progress in combating climate change.
This affected countries like Brazil, where there had been considerable success in reforesting the Amazon rainforest, Gabriel said. Germany currently holds the G8 presidency.
A second point of conflict was the US refusal to back the Emissions Trading Scheme operating in Europe that allows companies in energy-intensive industries to trade carbon-dioxide emissions.
The German environment minister stressed, however, that US delegation head Stephen Johnson had laid out the effective US climate-protection policy.
The real conflict lay in the fact that Washington was pursuing a national climate-change policy and not participating in the carbon-dioxide goals laid out in the United Nations’s 1997 Kyoto Protocol, Gabriel said.
He noted that Johnson had not objected to his call to do more to limit greenhouse-gas emissions.
UN Climate Secretariat director Yvo de Boer confirmed that there were many points in common with the US, which accepted the scientific case for climate change and acknowledged the need for action.
Gabriel called for a close link between combating climate change and promoting economic development. Developing countries feared that new rules could hinder their economic growth, he said.
While no negotiations were conducted in Potsdam, the delegates prepared the ground for the G8 summit in June in the northern German town of Heiligendamm and for the UN’s climate conference in Bali, Indonesia, in December.
The director of the UN Environment Programme, Achim Steiner, expressed satisfaction at the results of the meeting that included the environment ministers of five major developing countries.
Steiner stressed that he did not expect a ”major advance” at the Heiligendamm summit, as Europe, the US and the developing countries still had much work to do.
On Friday, the G8 ministers discussed biodiversity and the extinction of species with environment ministers from Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa in the historic Schlosshotel Cecilienhof on Lake Jungfernsee.
They agreed to commission a detailed study of the economic cost of biodiversity loss and a status list of the destruction of animal life, forests and plants. — Sapa-dpa