Six-nation climate change meeting likely delayed

CANBERRA (Reuters) – A six-nation meeting to combat global
warming is unlikely to be held in November as planned and
Australia is aiming to host the talks at the end of this year
or early 2006, Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane said on
Tuesday.

The Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and
Climate between Australia, the United States, Japan, India,
South Korea and China was unveiled in July with an aim to cut
greenhouse gas emissions by developing energy technology.

Officials in Canberra said the talks were due to be held in
November, but attempts to coordinate foreign, environment and
energy ministers from the six nations to attend the meeting in
the southern Australian city of Adelaide had proved difficult.

“I wouldn’t be expecting it in November, it will be late
this year or early next year,” Macfarlane told reporters. “We
have to fit in with five other governments and obviously it’s
important that the date suits as many as those as possible.”

Macfarlane, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and
Environment Minister Ian Campbell will meet shortly to draft a
program for the meeting of the partnership, which grew from a
brainstorming meeting of 20 countries on climate change in
Britain at the start of the year.

According to figures to be released by the partnership, the
six founding partners of the new pact account for 45 percent of
the world’s population, 48 percent of the world’s greenhouse
gas emissions and 48 percent of the world’s energy consumption.

The pact, dubbed “beyond Kyoto,” has been described as
complimentary to the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions
that the United States and Australia have refused to ratify.

Both nations say Kyoto could threaten economic growth and
that excluding large developing nations such as China and India
from meeting emissions targets didn’t make sense.

Officials from 150 nations meet in Canada next month to
discuss how to take the Kyoto pact beyond 2012, when its first
phase ends.

The pact, which came into force this year, obliges only
developed nations to meet emissions targets while developing
nations, including big polluters China and India, are excluded
until at least 2012.

Asia-Pacific partnership pact members say cleaner
technology is a better way to curb emissions of carbon dioxide
and other greenhouse gases that many scientists blame for
rising global temperatures.