Developing nations dig in heels on climate
Source: Reuters
(Recasts with quotes India, China, U.N. official) By Laura MacInnis DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan 25 (Reuters) - Developing countries, who stand to suffer the worst effects of climate change, said on Thursday they would not shoulder full responsibility for a problem created mainly by the rich. At a gathering of 2,400 of the world's most powerful people at Davos, a ski resort in the Swiss Alps, leaders from India, China and Brazil asserted a right to stoke their own economies, even if greenhouse gas levels rise as a result. "Compromising with the growth objective is simply out," said Montek Ahluwalia, deputy chief of India's planning commission. Noting that many rich signatories to the Kyoto Protocol -- an international climate change treaty -- have missed their emissions-cutting targets, Ahluwalia said the developing world wanted stronger support to help them reach environmental goals. "Anything that creates an incentive mechanism with some assured financial support that would enable developing countries to put in place cleaner technologies, that should be welcome," he told a World Economic Forum session. Zhang Xiaoqiang, vice-chairman of the Chinese national development and reform commission, told the same meeting that while China was committed to using energy more efficiently, the main burden for fighting global warming lay with Western powers. "Apart from our own efforts we expect developed countries to play a more fundamental role," Zhang said, listing investments in climate change research, technology transfers for emerging countries, assistance for adaptation, and leadership in setting concrete emissions targets as key requirements. Global warming concerns have dominated much of the Davos proceedings this year, which started the day after U.S. President George W. Bush acknowledged climate change as "a challenging issue" in his State of the Union address. Without making specific pledges, rich-country participants at the World Economic Forum repeatedly raised the need to help developing countries -- particularly booming economies such as China and India -- respond to environmental pressures. In Tokyo, the head of the United Nations Climate Secretariat said that more active involvement from emerging nations was crucial for global efforts to cut greenhouse gases. "But for this they need international help," Yvo de Boer told journalists on Thursday after a climate change conference. Barbara Stocking, director of Oxfam Britain, said that "big sums of money" would be needed to help poor countries cope with global temperature rises, which have already triggered irregular rainfall, floods, droughts and storms, intensifying humanitarian crises in East Africa and elsewhere. "We have already seen that the effects of climate change are hitting poor people hardest and earliest," she said in an interview in snow-covered Davos, where chill winds have marked the end of a mild early winter in Switzerland. Emissions-cutting technologies, particularly tools to help trap carbon dioxide from burning coal, were repeatedly cited in Davos as a necessity for developing world players to temper the environmental impacts of their fast growth. Nicholas Stern, advisor to the British government on climate change, said getting such technology to countries like China and India, which rely on coal is a key power source, was critical. "This is not about stopping growth. It is about doing things in different ways," Stern told Reuters Television. "I think that rich countries should shoulder the bulk of that cost." Others said that more stringent monitoring of emissions from the Western powers would help convince emerging nations of the need to act. Brazil's trade and industry minister, Luiz Fernando Furlan, said "an international task force" to enforce commitments made under Kyoto could be a useful step. (Additional reporting by Teruaki Ueno in Tokyo)
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