Bangkok - UN-sponsored climate change talks opened Monday in Bangkok with pressure on the participants to ink an agreement on cutting carbon emissions by next year. "The Bali outcome created huge public expectations for strengthening international action on climate change by 2009," said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is hosting the meeting.
The five-day gathering, coming three months after a landmark agreement reached in Bali to set a road map for strengthening international action on climate change, is tasked with setting the work programme for negotiations to be concluded by the end of next year on concrete plans to halt increases in global carbon emissions by 2015 and dramatically cut them by 2050.
"We have just one and a half years to complete negotiations on what will probably be the most complex international agreement that history has ever seen," de Boer said, "but I am confident that it can be done if the work is broken up into manageable, bite-sized chunks."
He predicted that some additional climate change meetings might be needed besides one planned later this year in Poznan, Poland, and Copenhagan in 2009.
"It's not like the WTO [World Trade Organization] where you have a continuous negotiating process, but we have, I believe, a much more complex issue at hand and considerably less time to deal with it," de Boer said as 1,180 delegates from 163 countries met in Bangkok.
The challenge is to design a future agreement that would halt the increase in global emissions within the next 10 to 15 years and dramatically cut back emissions by 2050 in a way that is economically viable and politically equitable worldwide.
The Bangkok meeting also involves talks among industrialized nations on rules to meet their long-term commitments under the emissions-cutting Kyoto Protocol.
"You should not expect us to finalize these things this week," said Harald Dovland, chairman of the second group. He added that it hoped to agree to the Kyoto rules by the end of August.
"If we have nothing by Christmas, then I'll get desperate," Dovland said.
One controversial area at the Bangkok talks was expected to be Japan's proposals to include targets on an industry-by-industry basis for increasing energy efficiency, which was seen as an effort to pressure developing countries such as China and India to commit to emissions cuts.
"I think Japan is making a big mistake," said Yurika Ayukawa, a member of the Japanese branch of the World Wide Fund for Nature, or WWF. "They are proposing something that is rejected by the countries that Japan wants to come on board."
December's Bali climate talks were deemed a success because they got beyond previous stalemates between developed and developing countries as neither group was willing to take the first steps in committing to carbon-emission cuts.
Bill Hare of Greenpeace International warned, however, that there were signs of backtracking among developed countries in their proposals in Bangkok.
"What we are seeing is that Canada, New Zealand, Australia and a few others are putting forward very strong positions in favour of accounting for credits from agricultural soil or forestry activities that amount to loopholes," Hare said. "They are loopholes because they are proposing exemptions ... they would get for regrowing wood on plantations, but they would not count the release of carbons from fire or insect damage."
Japan's so-called sectoral targets were cited by Hare as another possible loophole for Japan, whose energy efficiency is already high.
"If we can clarify here what the sectoral approach is, that would be a step forward," said Nicole Wilke, head of the German delegation.
She acknowledged that the Bangkok meeting might prove less "sexy" than the Bali one.
"Here we have to agree on a work programme, which is not as sexy as other things, but it is the next step, and then we have to go into the nitty gritty," Wilke said.
