Kyoto, Japan - German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned Friday
that when the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012, developing countries
would ask the established industrialized countries that signed it
whether they had met the treaty's goals to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions.
Some are expected to be hard-pressed to answer in the affirmative,
including some countries in the European Union, such as Spain,
Portugal and Greece. Japan is also currently showing an increase in
emissions.
Merkel and other world leaders are pushing to have developing
countries be bound by worldwide climate-protection targets to be set
in a new treaty. Under the Kyoto Protocol, developing countries like
China and India, which both ratified the treaty, were not required to
reduce the carbon emissions that contribute to global warming.
Merkel made her remarks on a visit to Kyoto, where the 1997 treaty
was signed. Her first visit to Japan also came ahead of a December
meeting in Bali that was expected to get talks rolling on sealing a
new deal by 2009 on fighting global warming.
The chancellor said the world should brace itself for difficult
negotiations.
'Because so much is riding on this, the negotiations will be
difficult, but there is just no way to get around it,' Merkel said on
the final day of her three-day trip to Japan.
Merkel said a balance must be struck in a new environmental treaty
with all countries contributing to the fight against global warming.
On Thursday in Tokyo, Merkel made a proposal that she hoped would
move developing countries to support the establishment of binding
carbon emission caps, suggesting they be set on a per-capita basis.
Developing countries in general produce far fewer greenhouse gases
than established industrialized countries. China is an exception, and
by some accounts, China overtook the United States this year as the
world's largest greenhouse gas emitter, but with its 1.3 billion
people, China's per-capita production would still fall far short of
per-capita production in the West.
Officials in the delegation travelling with Merkel said the German
Environment Ministry and the chancellor's office had begun
calculations to determine where that worldwide per-capita limit
should be set to achieve the desired halving of carbon emissions by
2050, which was a goal the Group of Eight leading industrialized
countries set in June at a summit in Germany.
It was already clear that industrialized countries would have to
severely sink their output of such emissions.
Leading the charge toward such a drastic reduction was Europe and
Japan, but they alone would not be able to reach the goal, Merkel
stressed, pointing out that the annual per-capital production of
greenhouse gases in the United States was 20 tons and in China it was
3.5 while Europe produces 9.
Merkel called for a strengthening of relations with Asia and spoke
of shifts in world power dynamics. The Asia-Pacific was gaining in
importance and Europe must rethink its relationship to Asia, she said.
'We are looking to Asia,' she said, stressing the vitality of the
region and calling on the European Union to have closer cooperation
with the 10-nation Association of South-East Asian Nations.
As the last stop on her Asia trip, which also took her to China,
Merkel is to visit Osaka and the world athletics championships Friday
night and meet with German athletes there before leaving for Germany
on Saturday.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
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