Pick up baton, Britain urges Canada

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Riot police push back protesters, one bleeding, at right, during demonstration outside climate talks in Copenhagen Wednesday.

OTTAWA -- Canada faces international pressure to feature climate change as the centrepiece of next year's G8 and G20 summits, as climate negotiations in Copenhagen stumble.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper joins fellow leaders in the Danish capital Thursday in an effort to reach an agreement that might pave the way for a binding international treaty, still many months away, to reduce greenhouse gases.

After the meetings wrap up Friday, the climate-change baton will be passed to Canada, which hosts the next major international meeting: the G8 summit in Huntsville, Ont., in late June and the larger G20 gathering immediately after in Toronto.

British diplomats in Canada are pushing a climate-change agenda, and expectations are high in Western diplomatic circles that Canada will use its G8 presidency to take environmental leadership -- even though the Conservative government has been vilified by environmentalists as a climate-change laggard.

"Climate change, especially in the post-Copenhagen era, might be the natural topic to come up at the G8 and G20 summits next year," said Sabrina Schulz, the climate security team leader at the British High Commission in Ottawa. She heads a six-person team that Britain's Foreign Commonwealth Office has assigned to Canada to press government, business, academics and the military on security issues caused by climate change. They are among 100 special climate envoys Britain has dispatched to key countries such as the United States, China, Brazil and Russia.

In Copenhagen, negotiations to combat global warming entered a fraught 11th day Thursday with diplomatic deadlock looming and barely a day left before U.S. President Barack Obama and more than 100 other leaders hope to sign a historic agreement to control greenhouse-gas emissions.

Poorer nations stalled Wednesday's negotiations in resistance to what they saw as efforts by the rich to impose decisions falling short of strong commitments to reduce greenhouse gases and to help those countries hurt by climate change. Conference observers said, however, that negotiators still had time to reach agreements.

Outside the meeting site in Copenhagen's suburbs, police fired pepper spray and beat protesters with batons as hundreds of demonstrators sought to disrupt the 193-nation conference, the latest action in days of demonstrations to demand "climate justice" -- firm steps to combat global warming. Police said 260 protesters were detained.

Earlier, behind closed doors, negotiators dealing with core issues debated until just before dawn without setting new goals for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions or for financing poorer countries' efforts to cope with coming climate change, key elements of any deal.

In those talks, the U.S. delegation apparently objected to a proposed text it felt might bind the United States prematurely to reducing emissions before Congress acts on the required legislation. U.S. envoys insisted, for example, on replacing the word "shall" with the conditional "should."

Later, faced with complaints from developing nations about such changes, the Danish leaders of the talks crafted what they hoped would be a compromise text. Even before that was circulated, however, the unhappy nations -- the Group of 77 and China -- met separately to decide on a position.

"They are unhappy about these texts being handed to them from above," an African delegate said outside the meeting, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

There were some steps forward, too. The United States, Australia, France, Japan, Norway and Britain pledged $3.5 billion in the next three years to a program aimed at protecting rain forests. The U.S. portion was $1 billion.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the money would be available for developing countries that come up with ambitious plans to slow and eventually reverse deforestation -- an important part of the talks because it's thought to account for about 20 per cent of global greenhouse emissions.

Still unresolved are the questions of emissions targets for industrial countries, billions of dollars a year in funding for poor countries to contend with global warming, and verifying the actions of emerging powers like China and India to ensure that promises to reduce emissions are kept.

tries.

Governments weeks ago gave up hope of concluding a finished treaty at Copenhagen and aimed instead at establishing a framework for negotiating more formal agreements next year.

-- CP / AP

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 17, 2009 A11