Bali Island, Indonesia - Finance ministers from around 20 countries met in the Indonesian resort island of Bali on Tuesday to discuss how to boost the financial response to global warming. "Ministers of finance can and should, play a more active role in responding to climate change - both domestically and internationally," Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said in an opening remark.
The two-day meeting, hosted by Indonesia, is taking place on the sidelines of the December 3-14 global forum on climate change.
Indonesian Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati, said ministers would discuss and assess possible costs of climate change and its implication on development agenda.
Although the talks were not framed as a pledging session, Indrawati said the United States had finalized a commitment to forgive about 20 million dollars in Indonesian debt in exchange for forest conservation.
The so-called debt-for-nature swap is part of a planned Indonesian 200 million dollars scheme to which non-government organizations (NGOs) could take part, she said.
"We call on these finance ministers to agree to fund the energy revolution that the world needs to stop climate change," said Sven Teske of Greenpeace.
"Investing in a renewable electricity future will save 10 times the fuel costs of a business-as-usual, fossil-fuelled future, saving 180 billion dollars annually and cutting CO2 emissions in half by 2030."
Indonesia is one of the world's biggest emitters of greenhouse gases because of chronic deforestation. The country has already lost 72 per cent of its 123 million hectares of ancient rain forest, Greenpeace estimated in May.
Considered a scientific curiosity until recently, global warming has surged to the top of the political agenda and spilled into the business arena as awareness grows of a cost - as well as opportunities for profit - that could run into trillions of dollars.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this year delivered a sobering message that global warming will most certainly cause loss of species habit, increased storm intensity, dangerous drought, floods and rising sea levels.
Delegates from nearly 190 countries hope to adopt a framework by Friday that would launch a two-year negotiating process to reach an agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012.
Kyoto requires 36 industrial nations to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other global-warming gases by an average 5 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012. The United States is the only major industrial nation to not ratify the Kyoto Protocol.
