Environment ministers from the world’s largest polluters, including the US and China, met in Mexico yesterday under a US bid to speed up work towards a key UN climate accord.
The Major Economies Forum aims to help form a new agreement to curb greenhouse gases to replace the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012.
The group’s third meeting in as many months comes as worldwide climate negotiations are stalling ahead of a major Copenhagen summit in December aimed at producing the new UN accord.
Twelve days of international climate change talks ended last week in Germany without progress on the biggest question of how to share the burden of future emissions cuts.
Poor nations are seeking deep cuts from rich countries which are historically most to blame for today’s problems.
They are mostly calling for cuts of between 25 percent and 40 percent by 2020 compared with 1990 levels. Some nations, including China, have said 40 percent must be a minimum.
Within industrialized countries, the EU has offered a cut of at least 20 percent over 1990, but Japan and the US have so far offered reductions of around 8 percent and 4 percent respectively.
The forum was launched by US President Barack Obama on the back of a similar initiative by former US president George W. Bush. Its members already met in Washington and Paris in April and last month.
Participants include Australia, Brazil, the UK, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, Sweden and the US, as well as the 27-nation EU.
Representatives from the United Arab Emirates, Norway and Spain will take part as observers, Mexican officials said.
The talks come as international support is growing for a Mexican proposal to raise billions of dollars to fight climate change through a so-called “Green Fund.”
The plan would oblige all governments to pay in cash based on a formula reflecting the size of each nation’s gross domestic product, greenhouse gas emissions and population.
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