#6
Russia holds key at UN climate talks
AFP
November 9, 2001

Russia emerged as the main obstacle preventing a deal to conclude the Kyoto Protocol, the historic but troubled UN accord on global warming.

Russia was standing by its demand for further concessions on forestry, the issue that has bedevilled Kyoto since its birth in 1997, diplomats said Thursday, as the clock ticked to a deadline late Friday for completing the draft treaty.

"The political progress achieved in negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol does not solve our concerns with regard to the development of specific mechanisms for its realisation," Russian chief delegate Alexander Bedritsky said, adding he was "strongly concerned" about how the negotiations on forests were unfolding.

Belgian secretary of state Olivier Deleuze, whose country chairs the European Union, was asked by reporters if Russia's hardline stance could prompt its allies in the talks -- Australia, Canada and Japan -- to follow suit.

That could cause a delicate deal reached in Bonn less than five months earlier to unravel.

"That is exactly the question that we are asking ourselves," Deleuze said. "We had an agreement in Bonn and we want to stick to this agreement."

Kyoto requires more than three dozen industrialised countries to make a cut by 2010 of just over five percent in global emissions of "greenhouse" gases, the carbon pollutant that results mainly from burning oil, gas and coal.

The pact was born amid scientific concern, now a crescendo, that these gases are warming Earth's atmosphere, stoking potentially catastrophic change to the planet's climate system.

The Bonn deal saved Kyoto after the United States walked away from the pact in March, but at the cost of big concessions to Russia and its three allies.

These countries argued that their forests are valuable assets which soak up carbon dioxide (CO2) and thus should be generously offset against their national targets for emissions cuts -- a big money-saver.

Delegates said that the Russian demand was a near doubling of the concession it got in Bonn.

But they expected the figure would be whittled down by haggling without provoking a me-too response from Australia, Canada and Japan.

"I expect that we will reach an agreement despite the countries which are still making problems," German Environment Minister Juergen Trittin said.

The three-day meeting in Marrakesh, gathering environment ministers from 165 states and two observers, has to smooth out other important legal and technical details before Kyoto is a done deal.

Among them: the criteria for making a country eligible to Kyoto's "flexibility mechanisms" -- an innovation that would harness market forces to help the industrialised world reach its pollution target with less economic pain.

The mechanisms comprise a market in carbon gas to help countries meet emissions quotas, as well as a system to give countries and corporations "carbon credits," which can be bought and sold, if they export clean technology.

These ideas are notoriously complex and famously untested.

But if they succeed, they could create trade worth hundreds of billions of dollars per year and act as a powerful engine to drive emissions cuts.

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