Clouds hanging over climate talks

The latest round of United Nations climate talks starting in South Africa today looks set to be dominated by disputes over negotiating a new international treaty to tackle global warming.

In the run-up to the annual talks, which this year are being held in Durban, experts have warned that levels of the greenhouse gases that drive climate change have reached a record high, and that global warming is likely to result in more extremes of weather including heatwaves and storms.

Last week, the UN Environmental Programme released a report showing the gap between what countries have voluntarily pledged to do to cut emissions, and what needs to be done to keep global temperature rises below 2C and avoid “dangerous” climate change, is even wider than thought – but can be closed with swift action.

Ahead of the talks, UK Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne said: “Preventing floods, droughts and freak weather patterns for future generations requires the world’s governments to get down to serious talking in Durban over the next two weeks.

“We need to send out the strongest possible signal on our commitment to limit global temperature change.”

Stewart Stevenson, the Scottish minister for environment and climate change, said before he left for the talks along with the UK delegation that Scotland has a “moral obligation” to set an example of how to tackle climate change.

But while Europe, which negotiates as a bloc at the talks, wants a comprehensive, binding treaty on climate change to cover all major economies, some of those countries do not want even to begin negotiating a new deal.

And developing countries have said that their red line is the Kyoto Protocol, the existing climate treaty whose first term expires at the end of 2012, which they do not want to see jettisoned in favour of a new deal which they fear would be weaker.

Asad Rehman, of Friends of the Earth, said: “The Kyoto Protocol is the only legally binding agreement on climate,” adding that the most vulnerable countries, such as those in Africa and small island states, are worried that it would take five or even ten years to reach a new legally binding agreement.

In that time, the impacts of delaying action to cut emissions would be “catastrophic” for those countries.

However, Kyoto was never ratified by the US and does not cover major polluters such as China, whose emissions per head now outstrip France and Spain, while signatories including Canada and Russia, both of whom have huge fossil fuel reserves, have refused point blank to sign up to a second period of the treaty.

The EU, which had once hoped to replace Kyoto with a new global deal, is going to the talks prepared, it says, to sign up to a second phase of the protocol as long as others take action towards a wider legal agreement that covers all major economies.