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ASIA-PACIFIC-ENVIRONMENT: NEW CLIMATE IDEOLOGY, SAYS UAE PAPER
(Comtex Global News Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)ABU DHABI, Jan. 12, 2006 IPS/GIN, 2006 (WAM via COMTEX) --A United Arab Emirates (UAE) newspaper today commented on the first ministerial meeting of the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, which took place in Sydney on Tuesday.
Commenting editorially on the issue, the Sharjah-based 'The Gulf Today' said: The very philosophy of climate control has come under scrutiny with the opening of the first ministerial meeting of the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate.
The alliance is the culmination of enormous efforts by six governments: Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea and the U.S.
The ideology behind the partnership is that emissions can be brought down effectively by developing and spreading new technologies -- a fundamentally different approach from the Kyoto Protocol, which is a UN-brokered agreement under which industrialised countries will have to reduce their collective emissions of greenhouse gases by 29 per cent by 2010 with respect to the year 1990.
And different counties have different targets to meet.
The United States, the world's largest economy, is the greatest emitter of greenhouse gases. Competing economies like China and India, on their own, produce more than 20 per cent of the gases believed to warm the atmosphere.
Although, as of December 2005, 157 counters have signed or ratified the Kyoto Protocol, debate is still on how to enforce the agreement.
Having different perspectives on the implementation of the agreement, Australia and the U.S. have both withdrawn from the protocol.
They claim that the commitment would severely damage their economies because Kyoto had set commitments only for a small number of developed countries and did not impose obligations on most of the rest.
Ironically, even those countries which have signed the agreement, especially China, India and South Korea, have strong reservations on binding targets on reducing emissions.
They maintain that resections on emissions would affect their economic growth and place them in a disadvantages position vis-a-vis developed countries.
It was in this background that the U.S. and Australia took the initiative to form the alliance which will be a voluntary body without international commitments such as those contained in the Kyoto Protocol.
The new group wants to promote technology transfer between developing and developed countries to reduce greenhouse gases as most of the emission is coming from the developed world. If strong domestic measures like adoption of clean technologies are taken, they believe, emission would come down drastically.
The main difference between the new alliance and the Protocol is that the former imposes no condition, target or timetable while the latter does.
The question is: How effective would be voluntary agreements? Green groups say that the new alliance has no policy and is floated to bypass and emasculate Kyoto.
Since the new group aims to promote clean technologies among developing countries, the sensible approach would be to find space for the alliance alongside Kyoto. The two can complement each other, the paper concluded.
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