JAKARTA, Indonesia, Dec. 2 — Thousands of government officials, industry lobbyists, environmental campaigners and observers are arriving on the Indonesian island of Bali for two weeks of talks starting Monday that are aimed at breathing new life into the troubled 15-year-old global climate treaty.
A heightened sense of urgency surrounds the meeting in light of a report issued last month by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which detailed the potentially devastating effects of global warming in the panel’s strongest language yet.
But few participants expect this round of talks to produce significant breakthroughs. At most, they say, it will result in new commitments to negotiate to update the original treaty by the end of 2009.
“The bulk of attention will be on the future,” said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the organization administering the treaty. “My hope is that we can formally launch negotiations and form an agenda for those negotiations that will lead to a long-term policy response to climate change.”
The original treaty, signed by almost all nations in 1992, set voluntary goals for curbing the emission of greenhouse gases, which mostly come from burning fossil fuels and forests, and which have been linked by scientists to global warming. But few of those goals have been met.
Five years later, the Kyoto Protocol, a much-praised 1997 addendum to the original pact, set mandatory limits on emissions, but only for the three dozen industrialized countries that ratified it, and only through 2012. Since it took effect in 2005, emissions have continued to rise in many of those countries.
“We would be in big trouble if we can’t reach an agreement to move forward by the end of the conference,” Mr. de Boer said. “The science is clear. We now need a political answer.”
By far, the biggest obstacle to forging a new accord by 2009 is the United States, analysts say. Senior Bush administration officials say the administration will not agree to a new treaty with binding limits on emissions.
Instead, President Bush recently proposed that the world’s biggest countries work toward a common, long-term goal set decades in the future, without specific targets or limits, and more immediate goals set by individual nations using whatever means they choose.
In his latest statement on climate change last Wednesday, Mr. Bush said, “Our guiding principle is clear: we must lead the world to produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions, and we must do it in a way that does not undermine economic growth or prevent nations from delivering greater prosperity for their people.”
Paula Dobriansky, the under secretary of state for democracy and global affairs, said in a recent interview that any new agreement should involve all the world’s major economies. “We feel very strongly about having a global framework here,” she said. “In order to have a global framework there has to be an effort here to determine how one can engage all the players. In order to do that there has to be some flexibility in this.”
The United States will soon stand alone among industrialized nations in its refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, with the new Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, having said in no uncertain terms that his country would now ratify it.
“The Bush administration is the only government in the world that is opposed to mandatory emissions reductions being included in a new treaty,” said Philip Clapp, the deputy managing director of the Pew Environment Group, based in Washington. “The question is, will they block others from moving forward.”
While most developing countries — including China, which is poised to overtake the United States as the largest source of greenhouse gases — have agreed to negotiate treaties that require richer nations to reduce emissions, they remain opposed to taking on such mandatory limits themselves.
By contrast, adherents to the Kyoto pact, led by the European Union, are eager to extend and even broaden current emission restrictions. One reason is that Kyoto nations are already buying and selling credits — already worth several billion dollars a year — for cutting greenhouse gas emissions under the so-called cap-and-trade system. Such trade could collapse if the restrictions are not extended.
“Negotiations in Bali cannot afford to fail,” said Adam Nathan, director of communications for the Carbon Markets Association, an international industry trade association. “It is vitally important that ministers meeting in Bali do not let the date for a new global agreement slip beyond 2009, as this will send a weak signal to the carbon markets.”
The growing call for financial aid to help the developing countries most threatened by the negative effects of a warming climate — like harsher droughts, floods and disrupted water supplies and agriculture — is expected to be a central issue at the Bali talks.
The recent United Nations Human Development Report pointedly criticized the world’s industrialized powers for not living up to existing commitments under the original Framework Convention. So far, only $26 million has made it through financial pipelines ostensibly intended to funnel billions of dollars for climate-adaptation assistance, the report said.
The United States also plans to press for commitments by rich countries to spend more to refine and deploy nonpolluting energy technologies, including systems for capturing carbon dioxide emitted by power plants, and for all countries to change trade and tariff policies to speed the diffusion of such technologies to places where they are needed most, like China.
For ordinary residents here in Indonesia, a political solution cannot come soon enough. The WWF, the global conservation organization formerly known as the World Wildlife Fund, says Indonesia is highly vulnerable to climate change. Drought, floods, landslides and rising sea levels are part of daily life here.
“To Indonesians, these problems are becoming commonplace,” said Farah Sofa, national director of Walhi, Indonesia’s leading environmental watchdog group. “It’s really bad. Governments should be our protectors. They have to find a way forward.”
Peter Gelling reported from Jakarta, and Andrew C. Revkin from New York.
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