Associated Press
Two weeks of international climate talks marked by bitter disagreements and angry accusations culminated Saturday in last-minute compromises and an agreement to adopt a plan by 2009 to fight global warming.
Now comes the hard part.
Delegates from nearly 190 nations must fix goals for industrialized nations to cut their greenhouse gas emissions while helping developing countries cut their own emissions and adapt to rising temperatures.
Negotiators also will consider ways to encourage developing countries to protect their rapidly dwindling forests, which absorb carbon dioxide.
"This is the beginning, not the end," United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the Associated Press (AP) following the contentious climate conference, which went a day longer than scheduled. "We will have to engage in more complex, long, and difficult negotiations."
Targets
Those gathering on the Indonesian resort island of Bali were charged with launching negotiations to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. What gathered countries decide in the next two years will help determine how much the world warms in the decades to come.
In a series of pivotal reports this year, a U.N. network of climate and other scientists warned of severe consequences—including rising seas, droughts, severe weather, species extinction, and other effects—without sharp cutbacks in emissions of the industrial, transportation, and agricultural gases blamed for global warming.
To avoid the worst, the U.N.'s Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said, emissions should be reduced by 25 percent to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. Greenhouse and other heat-trapping gases should be reduced at least by half by 2050, they added.
(Related: Al Gore, Climate Panel Share Nobel Peace Prize [October 12, 2007])
Despite an aggressive EU-led campaign to include specific emissions reduction targets for industrial nations—using the figures and timetable above—the final agreement has none.
The guidelines were eliminated after the United States, joined by Japan and others, argued that targets should come at the end of the two-year negotiations, not the start.
