Barcelona - The United States was Monday accused of not making enough efforts to fight climate change as United Nations experts from 181 countries met in Barcelona for the last round of talks before the Copenhagen climate conference in December. Washington needed to be clearer about its national goals in reducing greenhouse emissions, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer said at the inauguration of the meeting in Spaiabn.
He also called on the US to be clearer about how it intended to financially help poorer countries to protect the global climate.
Without the United States making such an effort, it would be difficult to reach an agreement to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol in Copenhagen on December 7-18, de Boer said.
The targets that industrialized countries generally had put on the table were "clearly not ambitious enough," the UN's top climate change official said.
A vague result in the Danish capital would make subsequent negotiations even more complicated, de Boer cautioned, warning that a failure in the Danish capital could lead to a "common disaster."
The five-day talks in Barcelona were bringing together more than 4,000 delegates representing governments and organizations.
Martin Kaiser, a representative of the environmental group Greenpeace, described the United States as "the main problem" in the fight against global warming.
A "terrible future" awaited the world if "urgent" measures were not taken to protect the climate, Spanish Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega said at the inauguration of the meeting.
Countries such as China, India, Brazil or South Africa were tabling important proposals, making those made by industrialized countries often look less ambitious in comparison, de Boer and Kaiser said.
After two years of negotiations, many points remained open. The possibilities of a binding agreement in Copenhagen were regarded as slight, with negotiators hoping for a "political agreement" at best.
At the start of the meeting, Greenpeace demonstrators climbed up cranes at the building site of the unfinished Sagrada Familia cathedral, hanging up banners urging the international community to "save the climate."
