中国气候变化信息网 China Climate Change Info-Net

The European Union on Sunday urged governments to carry out pledges on mitigating global warming made at last year's UN ministerial climate change meeting as a climate change meeting kicked off here in Bangkok.

The EU also saw that the nuclear incident in Japan would have its impact on the talks in Bangkok and during the course of further climate change negotiations leading to the next ministerial meeting in Durban, South Africa later this year.

A meeting sponsored by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) began here on Sunday to discuss possible action plans in following agreements reached at the ministerial meeting in Cancun, Mexico last December.

"The first and foremost is certainly implementation," said Artur Runge-Metzger, the European Commission's director for climate strategy and international negotiations, at a press conference.

"The decisions that have been taken in Cancun particularly with respect to pledges that have been made by countries, we want them to implement those pledges, to turn them into domestic legislation, " he said.

The EU has already committed to reducing its members' greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent from their 1990 levels by the year 2020, said Jozsef Feiler, director of the Climate Policy Department of Hungary's Ministry of National Development, at the same conference. Hungary currently holds the presidency of the Council of the European Union.

Feiler said the EU had a longer-term plan to cut the grouping' s emissions by 80-95 percent by 2050, and has set a budget of 7.2 billion U.S. dollars for 2010-2013 as financial commitment to implement agreements reached at the last UNFCCC ministerial meeting in Cancun on Nov. 29 - Dec. 10.

He said he hoped the current Bangkok meeting, from April 3-8, would be able to make further progress after the Cancun meeting.

Feiler said party countries to the UNFCCC also needed to find a new legal framework to replace the Kyoto Protocol, under which 37 industrialized nations and the EU have committed to reducing their emissions by an average of five percent against 1990 levels over the five-year period from 2008-2012.

The protocol, which is repudiated by the United States, will expire in 2012. Some developing countries wanted to renew it while some developed nations preferred a replacement.

Feiler said the EU preferred a single legally binding global and comprehensive agreement for post-2012 that engaged all major industrialized nations.

He said he hoped the Bangkok meeting would work toward that goal while maintaining the momentum reached at Cancun.

"We saw that there was a very strong momentum in Cancun and that momentum should be kept," Feiler said at the press conference.

New institutions agreed in Cancun included a Green Climate Fund to house the international management on mitigating climate change, deployment and accountability of long-term funds for developing country support, a technology mechanism to promote clean technologies, and an adaptation framework to boost international cooperation to help developing countries protect themselves from climate change impacts.

Runge-Metzger said a committee on technology and a network of technology centers should be set up this year under the agreements reached in Cancun, as should a work plan to help developing countries adapt to the climate change.

He said the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan would have repercussions on the current talks in Bangkok and for the months to come on alternative clean energy sources.

He said before the incident in Japan, many countries had thought of nuclear power as the low-emission source of energy in alternative to fossil fuel.

"If you listen to the debates in many of those countries, there is now a question being put up whether this is the right form of energy we should be using," Runge-Metzger said.

Representatives from 175 countries are participating in the Bangkok meeting with 2,271 participants joining, of which 1,417 are government officials, according to a UN official.