Greenhouse gases at near-record levels in 2005

By James Kanter

PARIS: The volume of greenhouse gases emitted by industrialized nations rose to near-record levels in 2005, the United Nations said Tuesday, two weeks before political leaders meet in Bali, Indonesia, to agree on a road map for negotiations on a new global treaty to fight climate change.

Among the nations responsible for the rising trend was the United States and a number of former Soviet bloc countries that advanced economically without restraining their pollution levels, said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

"The story is that emissions are going up in a worrying way," de Boer said. Several countries "must do more to rein in their emissions" so that the volume of planet-warming gases peaks and starts to decline within 15 years, he said, echoing warnings made last week by UN scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Overall, the volume of emissions from highly developed areas of the world like Canada, Australia and parts of Western Europe rose 11 percent between 1990 and 2005, according to the report. Emissions from the United States climbed 16 percent over the same period and, on current trends, were projected to rise 26 percent above 1990 levels by 2012, the body said.

Emissions from many former Soviet bloc countries actually fell until the mid- to late 1990s. But that trend had reversed as those economies revived. In Russia, emissions between 1998 and 2005 had grown about 12 percent, according to UN officials.

"The numbers just confirm the trends we have seen," said Henrik Hasselknippe, an emissions expert with Point Carbon, a consultancy. "It's no surprise that 2005 brought with it huge emissions, and one would expect the same in 2006 because we've not seen any huge structural changes."

Looming over the talks in Bali is whether the United States, which refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, will join a new global treaty on climate change even if fast-developing countries like China and India continue to resist making cuts.

On Tuesday, officials at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is based in Bonn and which oversees the parent treaty that led to Kyoto, emphasized that many of the countries participating in the existing treaty were expected to make much more progress in cutting greenhouse gases than countries outside of the treaty.

Countries that signed the treaty were on target to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by as much as 11 percent in the five years through 2012 compared with 1990 levels - easily beating their target to cut emissions by an average of about 5 percent.

In some cases, these countries would make cuts by installing more efficient energy systems and by reducing their use of fossil fuels, said UN officials. Some of these countries also would buy their reductions from developing world countries, which can earn credits by committing to carbon-reducing projects.

But de Boer warned that car use across all industrialized countries remained a concern, with emissions in the transport sector showing the highest rate of growth in any economic sector - up 18 percent in 2005 compared with 1990 levels.

To be continue in other article...

(Jakarta, Kamis 21 February 2008, 07.39 pagi)

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