Wednesday, February 28 11:30 AM SGT Tough road ahead for meeting UN climate goals, experts warn PARIS, Feb 28 (AFP) - A range of problems, from political resistance to economic costs, surrounds the United Nations' keystone treaty on global warming even before the deal has been completed, UN experts say. "Many technical, economic, political, cultural, social, behavioural and/or institutional barriers" hamper efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they say. The warning comes in a draft document written by a working group by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the widest and most prestigious scientific authority on global warming. The working group was to begin a four-day meeting in Accra, Ghana on Wednesday to finalise the draft document, the last and most sensitive in a trio of IPPC reports on the biggest environmental disaster facing mankind. The preceding IPCC studies, issued in January and February, suggest the Earth's lower atmosphere will rise by up to 5.8 Centigrade (10.4 F) by 2100 as a result of releasing tens of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) from burning fossil fuels. This, in turn, will have a potentially ruinous effect on agriculture and water supplies, especially in poor tropical countries. There will also be more and longer droughts, as well as more landslides and flooding, and the possibility of more frequent violent storms. The cost to global GDP would amount to several percentage points by 2050 if nothing is done. Tasked with advising governments on how to mitigate this threat, the Accra working group outlines a panoply of options based around the Kyoto Protocol -- the ambitious but still-incomplete UN treaty to limit CO2 emissions. In a draft "summary for policy-makers," the panel highlights the benefits of a "carbon market" by which richer signatories could trade off their pollution to other developed countries. Without the market -- which means reducing CO2 through more expensive enforcement measures -- the cost for Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries would be from 0.2 to 2.0 percent of their gross domestic product (GDP) by 2010, depending on the region. But with unfettered access to the carbon market, the cost would fall to between 0.1 and 1.1 percent of GDP, the panel suggests. Signed in 1997, the Kyoto Protocol is a so-called framework treaty, setting down broad targets for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and the guidelines for achieving them. But efforts to decide exactly how to do this fell apart at a stormy meeting in The Hague last November, with the US, a lavish user of fossil fuels, painted as the villain by Western European nations. The talks are due to resume in late June or July, but many European negotiators are gloomy whether much can be achieved if President George W. Bush, an avowed critic of Kyoto, takes a tough line. A furious area of dispute was carbon "sinks" -- the value of forests in soaking up CO2 through photosynthesis. The US demanded a generous definition of this, in what the Europeans also attacked as another ploy to ease the cost for gas-guzzling American car owners. The draft Accra document gives some support to the US position, saying carbon sinks offer "significant, if often temporary" benefit. Planting lots of trees and preserving present forests could help save up to 20 percent of CO2 emissions by 2050, giving valuable time for finding cleaner energy sources, the panel believes. On the plus side, the draft document says there has been strong progress on cleaner car engines, hydrogen-based fuel cells and wind turbines. Taken together these technologies have the potential to reduce annual global greenhouse-gas emissions "close to or even below" those of 2000 by 2010, the draft says. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Home | Asia | World | Business | Technology | Sport | Entertainment | Newspapers Questions or Comments Copyright � 2000 AFP. All rights reserved. All information displayed in this section (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the contents of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presses. Copyright � 1994-2001 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved. _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com _______________________________________________ CrashList website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
