Climate change economist Nicholas Stern yesterday called on developed countries to accept binding greenhouse gas emission reduction targets of 80-90% below 1990 levels by 2050, with developing countries adopting targets by 2020. Speaking at the launch of his new report, Key elements of a global deal on climate change, he said that “we’re in a hurry to get a global deal”. With a successor to the Kyoto Protocol due to be agreed at international talks in Copenhagen in December 2009, the chairman of the UK’s committee on climate change, Adair Turner, described the report as “a crucial input into the discussions that are now taking place”.

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Greece has been suspended from U.N. carbon trading in an unprecedented punishment for violating greenhouse gas reporting rules that underpin a fight against global warming, officials said on Tuesday. A group of legal experts enforcing compliance with the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol also said it was opening proceedings against Canada for alleged violations of rules on accounting for heat-trapping gases. "Greece is declared to be in non-compliance," the enforcement branch said in a statement distributed by the Bonn-based U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, the first such ruling since Kyoto entered into force in 2005.

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Climate change expert Nicholas Stern says he under-estimated the threat from global warming in a major report 18 months ago when he compared the economic risk to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Latest climate science showed global emissions of planet-heating gases were rising faster and upsetting the climate more than previously thought, Mr Stern said in a Reuters interview today.

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Outgoing president George Bush announced today that he was setting a national goal for the United States to curb growth in greenhouse gas emissions by 2025. The target falls well below targets committed to by other nations. He reiterated his objections to the approach set out in the Kyoto Protocol, and his expectation that technology will provide the solution to the climate crisis. Bush said the target would be met through a national plan that "will be a comprehensive blend of market incentives and regulations to reduce emissions by encouraging clean and efficient energy technologies." He also said United States would be willing to build this plan into a binding international agreement, "so long as our fellow major economies are prepared to include their plans in such an agreement."

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Developing nations objected on Wednesday to possible curbs on greenhouse gases produced by industries such as steel or cement, telling U.S.-led climate talks that too strict standards could throttle their companies. Other countries expressed worries that such targets, championed by Japan as a possible element of a planned new U.N. climate treaty beyond 2012, should only be a complement to big cuts in emissions of gases led by industrial nations. Seventeen nations, the European Commission and the United Nations will meet in Paris on Thursday and Friday for a third round of a U.S.-led series of meetings to work out ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions. On Wednesday, India led objections at a preliminary workshop reviewing whether industries could take on sectoral goals to help curb more heatwaves, droughts, floods and rising seas predicted by the U.N. Climate Panel. Plans by rich nations to cut emissions of greenhouse gases "should not be diluted by a sectoral approach," R. Chidambaram, chief scientific adviser to India's government.

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China has already overtaken the US as the world's "biggest polluter", a report to be published next month says. The research suggests the country's greenhouse gas emissions have been underestimated, and probably passed those of the US in 2006-2007. The University of California team will report their work in the Journal of Environment Economics and Management. They warn that unchecked future growth will dwarf any emissions cuts made by rich nations under the Kyoto Protocol. The team admit there is some uncertainty over the date when China may have become the biggest emitter of CO₂, as their analysis is based on 2004 data.

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The world's top greenhouse gas emitters meet in Paris this week to work out ways to slow global warming with uncertainty about whether the U.S.-backed talks will help or hinder plans for a new U.N. climate treaty. Washington says the April 17-18 meeting, with a workshop on sectoral industrial greenhouse targets on Wednesday, is a step towards agreement by the end of 2008 on curbs by countries that emit 80 percent of the world's greenhouse gases. But many nations are skeptical about President George W. Bush's late conversion to a need for more climate action since the United States is isolated among rich nations in opposing caps on emissions under the U.N.'s existing Kyoto Protocol. "I still think it's helpful," said Yvo de Boer, the head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, of the U.S. track. Paris will be the third meeting since Bush sought talks in 2007 among major emitters such as China, India and the European Union. But there are risks of overlaps between the U.S.-led talks and separate U.N. negotiations among all countries meant to end in 2009 with a new global warming treaty to avert ever more droughts, floods, heatwaves and rising sea levels. De Boer said he sensed that some nations were "a little concerned ... that this (U.S.-led) process doesn't prejudge the outcome" of the wider U.N. negotiations.

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Representatives from more than 160 countries began formal negotiations here Monday on a treaty to mitigate climate change, with the secretary general of the United Nations, Ban Ki Moon, urging governments to help in "saving the planet." The talks, which are scheduled to conclude at the end of 2009, come three months after a rancorous meeting in Indonesia that exposed deep fissures in how countries plan to battle global warming. "Saving our planet requires you to be ambitious in what you aim and, equally, in how hard you work to reach your goal," Ban told delegates in a prerecorded video message. No breakthroughs are expected at the weeklong meeting in Bangkok, which is mainly intended to lay out the agenda for a series of subsequent sessions.

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U.S. investment bank Merrill Lynch and France's Societe Generale both launched global carbon indexes on Wednesday to track the international carbon markets, which were worth some $60 billion last year. The indexes will allow investors to access the world's carbon markets, including the European Union's emissions trading scheme and carbon trading markets under the United Nations' Kyoto Protocol.

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A next round of UN-sponsored global climate change negotiations - the Bangkok Climate Change Talks 2008 - is set to begin in Bangkok, Thailand on 31 March 2008. These talks will  move forward a set of decisions called the “Bali Roadmap”, adopted at the UN Climate Change Conference held in Bali in December 2007. On the one hand, the Bangkok Climate Change Talks are expected to establish a clear work programme for a negotiation process on strengthened international action against climate change, established under the Bali Roadmap. On the other hand, talks on further commitments for Kyoto Protocol Parties will include considering the possible tools available to industrialised countries to reach future emission reductions. The two processes are set to culminate in a strengthened and effective international climate change deal, to be clinched at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in 2009.

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