CHINA CLIMATE CHANGE MEETING AIMS TO CHANGE WHAT HAPPENED LAST TIME
Baku, October 5 (AZERTAC). China has opened a UN conference on climate change aimed at preventing a repeat of what happened at a climate change meeting last year.
Last year`s UN climate summit in Copenhagen failed to produce a legally binding treaty on curbing the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. That left environmentalists and political leaders deeply disappointed.
So the six-day Chinese meeting in the northern port city of Tianjin, just outside of Beijing, is aimed at narrowing differences before the next major year-end meeting in Mexico. To many, that meant setting less ambitious goals.
In her opening speech on Monday, UN climate chief Christiana Figueres minced no words about what needs to be done telling delegates that they, as government representatives, could continue the standstill or "you can move forward. Now is the time to make that choice."
UN Climate chief Figueres told the 3,000 attending the meeting that the ultimate objective of the talks, both in China and later in the year in Cancun Mexico, is to reach a climate agreement aimed at curbing the greenhouse gases which she said were already triggering extreme conditions in the world climate.
The UN talks are meant to produce a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol, which expire in 2012. The only country not to have ratified the Kyoto Protocol was the United States.
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