Binding emission cuts unlikely for India

China, India and other developing countries probably won't be required to take on legally binding commitments to cut their greenhouse-gas emissions under a new climate-change treaty, a United Nations official said today.

"The debate about binding commitments for developing countries is not off the table, but it's crawling towards the edge," said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is overseeing the negotiations.

Almost 200 countries are gathering on the Indonesian island of Bali this week and next to begin talks for a new treaty to replace the emissions-limiting the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in five years. The negotiations are focused on the question of how much the developing nations should contribute to efforts to curb global warming, a debate that's raged for more than a decade.

The US has refused to join the 1997 Kyoto accord in part because China and other rapidly emerging economies aren't required under the treaty to make the same pollution cuts as industrialised nations. The US and China are the world's largest emitters of global warming pollution.

China and other developing countries say they shouldn't be required to meet the same standard as the developed countries because they are in the early stages of trying to fuel economic growth to pull billions of people out of poverty. The European Union and environmentalists agree, though they say they want to see stronger efforts from the countries.

"China doesn't need to commit at this time," said Artur Runge-Metzger, head of climate strategy for the European Commission. "What we expect from China is massively improving energy efficiency."

Both the industrialised and the developing countries so far are "talking a lot about real measurable and verifiable" steps emerging economies can take to curb emissions without taking on mandatory reductions, de Boer told reporters today. Those measures include improving energy efficiency and working toward renewable energy goals, he said.

Such actions would be "capitalised at least in part through international financial flows," de Boer said.

Financial incentives could come both from a global carbon emissions trading market and "government-to-government" cooperation, de Boer said.

The focus on providing greater incentives for developing nations comes as countries such as India argued earlier this week that climate talks shouldn't even start before industrialised countries lived up to their previous promises to help poorer nations deal with the effects of climate change.

They are concerned that the developed nations will forget their commitments at the same time they expect more to be done by poorer nations, de Boer said in an interview yesterday.

"In a way it's a double whammy where commitments from the past aren't met and going into the future, something may be arranged that could hurt them economically," de Boer said.