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World told it's 'time to act' as summit begins
By Sun Xiaohua in Copenhagen, Fu Jing in Beijing (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-12-08 07:03
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Only half of the 36,000 delegates from around the world attending the UN's Copenhagen climate change conference were lucky enough to be seated Monday for the start of the long-awaited gathering aimed at finding a replacement for 1997's Kyoto Protocol, such was the interest from nations to send delegations.
Reliable sources said a high-level team of between 70 and 100 people will accompany Premier Wen Jiabao to the conference, which a senior Chinese official described yesterday as the "start of a new round of climate negotiation".
China has already sent around 50 negotiators and 30 advisors to the milestone meeting, which began on Monday in Copenhagen's Bella Centre.
The two-week summit is likely to attract 110 world leaders - "an unprecedented mobilization" of political resolve to reach a deal, said Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen.
He urged delegates from 192 countries and regions to be "ambitious, courageous and visionary" in negotiations, and said leaders should be ready to "act" and "not just to talk".
"We have tried as hard as possible to limit the carbon footprint of the conference" so you won't "find a figurine of the little mermaid" that tourists go to see in the Danish harbor.
Xie Zhenhua, China's special climate change envoy, told China Daily yesterday: "China will take the most active and constructive attitude to ensure the international community reaches a successful climate deal in Copenhagen.
"The Copenhagen meeting will not be an end, but a start for a new round of climate negotiation, which needs China to play an important role," Xie told a press conference.
Yang Ailun, Greenpeace China's climate change campaign manager, said: "China has much more confidence at the negotiating table this year because China has made comprehensive preparations."
Beijing released its energy intensity cut target for 2020 before the official delegation set off for Copenhagen. That, Yang said, gives negotiators the initiative during talks.
The UN said an unprecedented number of countries have promised emissions cuts.
"Never in 17 years of climate negotiations have so many countries made so many pledges," said UN climate convention head Yvo de Boer.
"For those who claim a deal in Copenhagen is impossible, they are simply wrong," said UNEP director Achim Steiner at the release of a climate report compiled by British economist Lord Nicholas Stern and the Grantham Research Institute.
Environmentalists have warned that emissions commitments were dangerously short of what UN scientists believe are needed to prevent average temperatures from rising more than 2 C above what they were when the industrial age began 250 years ago.
But most of those warnings were based on pledges only from industrial countries. The UNEP report included pledges from China and other rapidly developing countries.
The UNEP said all countries combined should emit no more than 44 billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2020. Adding up the commitments announced so far, the report said emissions will total 46 billion tons in 2020. Emissions today are about 47 billion tons.
"We are within a few gigatons of having a deal," Steiner said. "The gap has narrowed significantly."
