At Bali climate conference, signs of compromise

By Thomas Fuller and Graham Bowley

NUSA DUA, Indonesia: Countries gathering at a United Nations conference on climate change looked to be heading for a landmark agreement Friday on a deadline for negotiations to reduce the world's greenhouse gases, officials said. The tenor of the conference improved markedly from Thursday when, amid growing frustration with the United States, European nations threatened to boycott separate talks proposed by the Bush administration in Hawaii next month. Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is playing host to the meeting, and who on Thursday raised serious concerns about the slow pace of the talks, said that countries were "on the brink of agreement." "It's not actually all that much that is outstanding," he said. "People are working very hard to resolve outstanding issues."

The countries seemed to be nudging toward a deal on the plan for further negotiations over the next two years, although a final agreement was not expected until later Friday or in the early hours of Saturday morning. The delegates at the conference here are trying to reach a new agreement on global warming. There appears to be broad consensus that this should be ready by 2009, in time to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the current agreement that limits emissions by all wealthy countries except the United States, which signed the Kyoto agreement but has refused to adopt it. What form the final deal would take was still unclear, however. Officials have been tight-lipped about the negotiations, and it was still unclear whether the agreement would include a specific target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, something that has been at the core of negotiations here and which the Europeans have wanted.

Germany's environment minister, Sigmar Gabriel, who led the criticism of the United States earlier in the week, said Friday, "The climate in the climate convention has changed a little bit."

He added: "It's true that during the last night and during the negotiations America was more flexible than in the first part of the conference. We very much appreciate this. Not only the Americans but also other parties." It was not clear what had brought about the improved mood of cooperation. Amid the escalating bitterness between the European Union and the United States on Thursday, former Vice President Al Gore told delegates in a speech that, "My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali." He urged delegates to agree to an open-ended deal that could be enhanced after the Bush administration leaves office and the United States policy changes.

"Over the next two years the United States is going to be somewhere it is not now," Gore said to loud applause. "You must anticipate that." Gaping differences had been exposed between countries over how to share the burden of switching from types of energy that contribute to global warming, although these now seem to be closing somewhat.

The United States and the European Union have been at odds on many major points, including whether an agreement signed here should include a commitment to numerical targets, a move that the United States and a few other countries, including Russia, oppose. The emerging economic powers, most notably China and India, also refused to accept limits on their emissions, despite projections that they will soon become the dominant sources of the gases. Separately, the governments at the conference were close to agreement Friday on a system that would compensate developing countries for protecting their rainforests, a plan that environmentalists described as an innovative effort to mitigate global warming. The plan on deforestation, formally known as the Reduced Emissions from Deforestation in Developing Countries, is part of the wider discussions here on reaching a global agreement on addressing climate change.

The precise ways that countries with large rainforests, like Indonesia and Brazil, would be compensated have not been fully worked out. United Nations officials said that part of the financing would come from developed countries in the form of aid and that other funds would come from carbon credits — part of the system of incentives for reducing greenhouse gases mandated by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Norway has pledged close to $2.8 billion over five years as payment to developing countries that preserve their forests.

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(Jakarta, Kamis 21 February 2008, 07.39 pagi)

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