关于IPCC第三工作组的新闻

各位：

这是路透社从曼谷发出的报道。与刚才发出的香港分社记者所写有所不同，在具体内容上更加详细一些，有兴趣的朋友可以参考。

喻捷

Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Beijing baulks at draft report on climate

REUTERS in Bangkok

UN talks on climate change are at risk of getting bogged down under the weight of hundreds of amendments from governments and China 's objections to a proposed blueprint for battling global warming.

Scientists and government officials from more than 100 countries are meeting in Bangkok to review a 24-page draft summary for policymakers outlining ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions and the costs of preventing damaging climate change.

But, as with two other reports released this year by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), scientists are squaring off with governments, some of which want to change or water down the latest draft report due to be released on Friday.

Chinese officials have demanded the last-minute insertion of a paragraph spelling out that industrialised nations are to blame for most of the greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution. "They want a statement that the cumulative proportion of emissions due to industrial countries is very high - it's about 75 per cent," said a senior delegate.

Such a demand breached IPCC procedures and risked opening the way for other countries to request last-minute details to be inserted, potentially bogging down the talks, he said. "The Chinese ... want to gut the report of meaning in lots of different ways. So this is just the start of what they are up to," he said.

Governments had proposed about 1,500 amendments spanning more than 160 pages, and many would be discussed during the week in special contact groups, the delegate said.

The report estimates that stabilising greenhouse gas emissions will cost between 0.2 and 3 per cent of world gross domestic product by 2030, depending on the severity of curbs placed on rising emissions of greenhouse gases.

But sections of the report dealing with this could be altered or even taken out, the delegate said.

Another delegate, a veteran of climate negotiations, said the politicking was normal. "It's exactly the same as one would expect in these things. Basically what happens is there is a whole lot of fiddling around for the first couple of days and then people get down to work. This is standard UN practice."

He described Beijing 's move to insert the paragraph as nothing new, and mere posturing ahead of talks in December in Bali on the Kyoto Protocol at which China , India and other big developing nations will come under pressure to cut emissions.

China - including Hong Kong - is now the world's second biggest producer of greenhouse gases after the United States , and India is fourth. Beijing and New Delhi are excluded from Kyoto 's first phase, which ends in 2012 - setting targets to cut emissions - but Washington is demanding they agree to curbs. The US , which pulled out of Kyoto , says it doesn't make sense for the giant economies of India and China to remain outside a global emissions pact.

" China doesn't want to be corralled into commitments that minimise its freedom of action - and questioning the science, and digging in is part of that," said Paul Harris, an expert on climate change politics at Lingnan University in Hong Kong .

"It wants to put off into the future the serious discussion of accepting mandatory limits," Dr Harris said.

The Global Times, a Chinese state-run newspaper, last week accused western politicians of using "climate terrorism" to undermine the mainland's quest for prosperity.

Senior European Union climate policy expert Tom Van Ireland said it was crucial to engage Beijing to cap global emissions.

"We don't ask India , China and Brazil to do the same things we ask from developed countries, which is taking binding targets to reduce their emissions," he said.

But it was crucial they adopted cleaner and greener technology to cut emissions.



——绿色大学生论坛（GSF）王道光