BERLIN — The United Nations yesterday opened an 11-day global conference to try to cut man-made air pollution and save the planet from possibly disastrous climate changes.

The conference, with 1,000 delegates from at least 128 countries, is a follow-up to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and alms to produce a basis stretching into the next century for tackling man-made emissions which threaten to warm the world’s surface.

"This conference Is a flew beginning," said Mr Michael Cutajar, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change signed at the Rio summit.

Rio was a very modest first step, he told journalists. "Clearly there Is much more to be done, and Berlin is the time and the place to take the next step."

In Rio, industrialised countries promised to cut emissions of greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by the year 2000.

In Berlin, they will not only have to admit that they have fallen behind their target, but also try to establish a basis for what to do after the year 2000, including commitments from the developing world.

The meeting has already run into trouble. Oil-producing countries, led by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, tried in preliminary talks on Monday to scuttle attempts to agree on majority-rule voting procedures for the conference, delegates said.

The oil exporters are demanding consensus on all decisions and if they get their way, critics say, they could blunt the effectiveness of the meeting.

The gathering is not expected to produce binding agreements committing nations to cut emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases, which are produced largely through the burning of oil and other fossil fuels and trap heat in the atmosphere.

But if humans do not begin to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by the year 2000, global temperatures will climb by up to 4.5 deg C over the next century — with devastating results, a UN scientific panel has warned.

In order to halt global warming, by 2050 at least half of the world’s energy must come from sources that do not produce greenhouse gases, said Mr Bert Bolin, chairman of the group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The panel says the world has warmed 0.5 deg C this century, and that the 80s were easily the warmest decade on record.

Industrial nations produce half the world’s greenhouse gases. The United States alone accounts for 20 per cent of those emissions.

German Environment Minister Angela Merkel, expected to be appointed conference president yesterday, supports a proposal from the Association of Siiall Island States for a drastic 20-per-cent cpt in emissions of greenhouse gases by 2005.

But she admits the proposal has little chance of success, as the euphoria of Rio has worn off and many dev~1oping countries have started to worry that the industrialised world is making unfair demand which could slow their industrial progress.

This is little consolati4n to the small islands, which could be ai4ong the low-lying areas washed off the map next century if, as many scientists expect, a warmer atmosphere leads to a dramatic rise in sea levels.

"Each tick of the clock could be time lost in saving some 30 small island nations from drowning in a sea of rising tides," President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom of the threatened Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean told a meeting of municipal leaders on Monday.

Said Mr Cutajar: "These are clearly the victims. They don’t contribute much in the way of atmospheric pollution, but they suffer the most." — Reuter, AP.

Source : The Straits Times 29th Mar 1995

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