OSLO, March 30, 2007, by Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent, Reuters – Developing countries are doing almost as much as rich nations to slow global warming, often as a side-effect of curbs on rising energy use, the head of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said on Thursday.

Achim Steiner said countries such as China, Brazil or South Africa should get more credit for tougher fuel efficiency for cars or curbs on deforestation. Such measures might be building blocks for a global deal to fight climate change beyond 2012.
“Developing countries have been doing a lot” to slow a rise in emissions of greenhouse gases, he told Reuters during a conference in Oslo about promoting economic growth while safeguarding the environment.

“Since 1990 developing countries have reduced their emissions pathway in such a way that it is almost equivalent to what (rich nations) committed to under the Kyoto Protocol, in millions of tonnes,” he said of preliminary data.

Kyoto binds most industrialised nations to cut emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels, by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. A UNEP official said commitments totalled more than 800 million tonnes a year.

Developing countries have no goals for limiting emissions under Kyoto and talks on getting them more involved beyond 2012 are stalled. But Steiner said they were slowing rising energy use, often as a reaction to oil prices at around US$68 a barrel. Use of fossil fuels is widely blamed for stoking global warming.

Recognising what they have done might change the perception in the West that the China, Brazil and South Africa are not interested and haven’t done anything, Steiner said. “This is part of the key to unlocking the climate negotiations, to shift the focus…to what countries are doing in their domestic agendas that’s relevant,” he said.

He said it was wrong to believe that poor nations would not take part beyond 2012 simply because the United States, the biggest emitter, opposed Kyoto. President George W. Bush pulled out in 2001, saying Kyoto would cost US jobs and wrongly excluded developing nations until 2012.

China, for instance, has set goals for reducing the amount of carbon emitted per unit of economic output.
And India has limited growth of energy use to 3.7 percent a year, far below economic growth of 8 percent, Surya Sethi, an energy adviser to the Indian Government Planning Commission, told the Oslo conference.

Steiner said Brazil had slowed emissions from deforestation in the Amazon basin — trees store carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, when they grow and release it when they rot. Brazil is also a leader in biofuel use.

Climate scientists say that emissions from burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and cars are “very likely” to be the main cause of global warming in recent decades and could bring more storms, droughts and rising seas.

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China to Unveil Climate Plan Next Month – that is by April 24, 2007.

BEIJING, March 30, 2007 – China will unveil its national plan to tackle global warming next month, including concrete measures to cut carbon dioxide emissions, a top climate change official said on Thursday.

Gao Guangsheng, head of the Office of the National Coordination Committee for Climate Change, said the plan, to be announced on April 24, would include policies for cutting back greenhouse gases but declined to comment on whether it would give an overall national target.
“We will make clear what policies and (in) what areas we plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Gao told the Renewable Energy Finance Forum in Beijing.

China could become the world’s top emitter of greenhouse gasses as early as this year, analyst estimates based on the country’s latest energy data suggest.

Gao declined to comment on that forecast, or an International Energy Agency one that it will overtake the United States before 2010, because he said the country does not have an accurate idea of its own emissions.

An inventory is now under way but results could take up to three years to come through, he added.

Beijing has resisted calls for caps on its rapidly rising emissions, saying rising global temperatures are largely the result of fossil fuel use by industrialised nations and it has the right to chase the same level of prosperity they enjoy.

But 35 developed nations that have agreed to cut emissions under the Kyoto Protocol want others — especially China and the United States — to do more.

Gao also ruled out any possibility of an emissions trading exchange in the next two to three years, although he had been present at the launch of a UN scheme which officials had said would include carbon trading.

“No Chinese official said there would be an exchange,” Gao told Reuters on the sidelines of the forum.

His office had earlier posted a notice denying reports of the exchange plans, but UN officials had said they were still working with Chinese counterparts on some kind of blueprint.