MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Greenhouse gas emissions treaty extended beyond 2012

Ministers at the climate change conference in Montreal managed several last minute breakthroughs in plans to combat global warming, basically extending the treaty on greenhouse emissions reductions beyond the 2012 deadline.

A broader group of countries including United States agreed to non-binding talks on long-term measures. The US had refused to accept any deal leading to commitments to cuts, but following a speech from former President Bill Clinton, who said the US approach was "flat wrong", the official US team appeared to shift its position.

The U.S. could "meet and surpass the Kyoto targets easily in a way that would strengthen, not weaken, [its] economy" with the full application of existing clean energy and energy conservation technologies, Clinton underlined.

"There's no longer any serious doubt that climate change is real, accelerating and caused by human activities," he said.

There were also large U.S. delegations, including mayors from 190 cities, U.S. senators, and leading business groups in Montreal. All of these groups advocate strong international action on climate change, and most have already taken steps to make reductions at the local and state level.

Formal talks can now begin over the precise targets which will be set when the first phase of the Kyoto agreement expires in 2012 and it sets the scene for discussing how large developing countries such as India and China could be brought into the system of limiting greenhouse gas emissions.

Canadian Environment Minister Stephane Dion, who hosts the conference, described the agreement as "a map for the future, the Montreal Action Plan, the MAP".

"This has been one of the most productive U.N. climate change conferences ever," said Richard Kinley, acting head of the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat. "This plan sets the course for future action on climate change," said Kinley in a statement.

The Montreal meetings comprised two tracks: the first Meeting of the Parties under the Kyoto Protocol and the eleventh session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The UNFCCC gave birth to the Kyoto agreement in 1997 and the U.S. remains a full participant in the UNFCCC.

The Bush administration pulled the U.S. out of the Kyoto treaty in 2001. That treaty is in force between 2008 and 2012 and commits participating developed nations to reductions in greenhouse gases to an average of 5.2% below 1990 levels.

In the final Montreal combined session, the 150-odd countries involved in Kyoto agreed to begin formal talks next spring on a new post-2012 treaty. But before that happened, the 190 countries involved in the UNFCCC, including the U.S., agreed to have further discussions, i.e. "a series of workshops to develop the broad range of actions needed to respond to the climate change challenge".

Another very important outcome of the Montreal meeting is the official adoption of a detailed Kyoto manual and rulebook -- the so-called "Marrakesh accords".