Bali:The green lobby will not be pleased, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor
The UN Conference on Climate Change is likely to end with an agreement on a Bali "road map" for a two-year round of more intensive negotiations to tackle global warming - but without specifying any targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
This 13th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change - or "COP-13" - is expected to produce a mandate for negotiations to begin next year, with a deadline of December 2009 for reaching agreement on all issues.
The lack of specific figures in the final text, which is now being negotiated by environment ministers and senior officials on all sides, will be seen as a fudge by environmentalists who are seeking commitments from rich countries to cut their emissions.
There will also be concern over the likely "constructive ambiguity" of the text on issues such as deforestation, technology transfer and funding to help poorer countries - which are expected to be hit hardest - adapt to the effects of global warming, such as drought and floods.
"The Bali road map needs to be more than a shell", said Richard Worthington, of Earth Life Africa.
"We would like to see a reference to the increase in temperatures being kept below two degrees, if we are to avoid hundreds of millions of environmental refugees."
Stephan Singer, of the World Wildlife Fund, complained that the EU was not showing enough leadership in confronting countries such as Canada and Japan, which were "playing a very destructive role here", according to Nur Hidayati, of Greenpeace in southeast Asia.
Mr Singer said emissions cuts of 25 to 40 per cent by 2020 reflected the latest scientific assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and needed to be included.
"Whatever we lose here, we won't get back over the next two years," he warned.
Mr Worthington claimed that the US was using other countries as "stalking horses" to ensure that the Bali road map would be as non-specific as possible.
"If it doesn't include a range of reductions [ for developed countries], it would end up as a shell," he said.
But Paula Dobriansky, head of the US delegation, insisted that it was playing a constructive role in Bali, saying global climate change "requires a comprehensive response" that would be "environmentally effective and economically sustainable" in dealing with all of the issues.
"Emissions are global and the solution, to be effective, must be global. We want the world's largest economies, including the United States, to be part of a global arrangement. An approach in which only some are committed to acting cannot be environmentally effective."
Dr Dobriansky, under secretary of state for democracy and global affairs, restated US opposition to including specific targets for cuts, saying "we don't want to to be prejudging outcomes here . . . We're at the beginning of a fluid process and we have to see where it goes."
For the first time, representatives of the media were ordered to leave the tiered press briefing room at the Bali conference centre yesterday morning so that it could be "swept" by armed police with sniffer dogs in advance of the arrival of the US delegation.
UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon said he wanted to remind ministers at the conference that they "must deliver on the call by world leaders for a breakthrough in Bali".
"We work for success not failure. We must be able to launch negotiations to reach an international agreement by end of 2009. It will be a difficult and complicated process. But what we want to see is the need to start it with a clear time-bound agenda."
Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, said that if the Bali summit did not move the process forward, it would not be "a failure of the UN" because it had provided "the science that is driving the policy debate".
He also singled out for praise countries as diverse as Costa Rica, Norway and New Zealand for "committing themselves to a path [ of development] that five years ago would have been regarded as science fiction" - the idea of adopting national targets for achieving "carbon-neutral" economies.
Costa Rica aims to achieve this goal as early as 2021, to coincide with the bicentenary of its independence from Spain, and one of the key measures it adopted - as long ago as 1996 - was to impose an extra 3.5 per cent tax on fossil fuels, to finance afforestation.