United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged the world on Wednesday to agree a sweeping treaty to fight climate change by 2009, telling UN-led talks in Bali to act now on ”the moral challenge of our generation”.
Ban also told more than 120 environment ministers at the December 3 to 14 meeting that the threat of global warming had a ”silver lining” because creative solutions could create jobs and ease poverty in developing nations from Africa to Asia.
”The time to act is now,” Ban told the ministers, split over the ground rules for starting formal negotiations on a new long-term global treaty to limit greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels.
”This is the moral challenge of our generation,” he said, saying there was a ”desperate urgency” to act to slow rising seas, floods, droughts, famines and extinctions of wildlife.
”Not only are the eyes of the world upon us. More important, succeeding generations depend on us. We cannot rob our children of their future,” he said.
Earlier, Australia’s Prime Minister Kevin Rudd handed formal papers to Ban ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, isolating the United States as the only rich nation without binding caps on greenhouse gas emissions under the UN deal stretching to 2012.
Ban said the Bali meeting should agree to a firm two-year deadline to agree a successor to Kyoto that would involve action by all nations, including the United States and poor countries led by China and India, whose emissions are soaring.
”You need to set an agenda — a roadmap to a more secure climate future, coupled with a tight timeline that produces a deal by 2009,” he said. The UN wants a new pact adopted at a meeting in Copenhagen in late 2009.
Some developing nations, worried that any commitments to curb fossil-fuel use might slow economic growth, want Bali to launch only non-binding talks.
Deeper cuts
And the United States opposes many other nations’ hopes for the guiding terms for negotiations to include a non-binding range for rich countries to cut greenhouse gases by 25% to 40% below 1990 levels by 2020.
Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono won applause from delegates by saying the US should be part of any new deal, as the world’s biggest economy and top greenhouse gas emitter.
”We are embarking on the biggest project in human civilisation,” he said. ”We must ensure that the United States … is part of such post-2012 arrangements.”
He said a new agreement should also include aid to poor nations that slowed the rate of deforestation. Forests soak up greenhouse gases as they grow and release them when burnt.
Ban said all nations should sign up because ”our atmosphere can’t tell the difference between emissions from an Asian factory, the exhaust from a North American SUV, or deforestation in South America or Africa”.
Rudd, whose Labour Party won a landslide election victory last month, handed over Kyoto documents to Ban after signing the pact last week as his first official act.
He said that Australia was already suffering from climate change — ranging from a drying up of rivers to disruptions to corals of the Great Barrier Reef. ”What we see today is a portent of things to come,” he said.
Apart from Australia, 36 Kyoto nations have promised to cut emissions by an average of 5% below 1990 levels by 2008 to 2012. The US argues Kyoto would hurt its economy and wrongly excludes 2008 to 2012 targets for poor nations.
Delegates at the opening of the talk’s high-level session held a minute’s silence for victims of car bomb attack in Algiers on Tuesday. Eleven UN employees are believed to have been among at least 26 people killed. – Reuters