UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was to heap pressure on world leaders yesterday, urging them to smash a deadlock threatening an upcoming conference on climate change in Bali.
Ban was to make the keynote address at an unprecedented world summit entitled "The Future in Our Hands: Addressing the Leadership Challenge of Climate Change."
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, in the vanguard of climate action at state level in the US, was also to address the meeting.
Around 150 countries were taking part in the one-day event, some 80 of them at the level of head of state and government, making it the most senior UN gathering ever held on climate change.
European countries, which have seized the political lead among industrialized countries in pledging cuts to their own emissions, are expected to seek a global commitment at the Dec. 3 to Dec. 14 meeting in Bali, Indonesia.
That meeting has the task of setting down a roadmap for negotiations that hopefully will conclude at the end of 2009 with a deal to accelerate and deepen cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases.
Once ratified -- a process that should take a couple of years -- the accord would succeed the first phase of the UN's Kyoto Protocol, which expires at the end of 2012.
Kyoto's future has been darkened since 2001, when the US, the world's biggest polluter, declared it would not ratify the treaty.
US President George W. Bush fiercely opposes Kyoto's binding caps and instead argues in favor of voluntary measures backed by technology transfer.
Green critics feel this is a tactic to delay Kyoto and divide its supporters by promoting the idea of a cosier, less ambitious alternative.
"I'd like to see a commitment from a majority of heads of state on using and strengthening the present [treaty] architecture and not reinventing it," said Steve Sawyer, secretary-general of the Global Wind Energy Council, a Brussels-based group lobbying for wind power. "Reinventing Kyoto will take 10 years to negotiate, and we don't have the time."
The UN summit was to unfold in four parallel sessions, covering adaptation to climate change, mitigation of greenhouse-gas emissions, technology and financing.
Ban was to present a summary of conclusions at the end of the day and follow this with a dinner gathering representatives from the world's biggest carbon polluters.
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