Australia proposes APEC sequel to Kyoto climate deal

Jun 7, 2007, 3:36 GMT

Sydney - Australia wants the 21 APEC members scheduled to meet in September in Sydney to commit to a new climate-change agreement that would trump the UN-sponsored Kyoto Protocol that 35 industrialized countries have embraced.

'Australia would like APEC leaders to help design a new approach for future climate-change action that could include all major emitters,' Prime Minister John Howard said in remarks reported Thursday.

Australia is the host of this year's meetings of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, a regional grouping that also includes the United States, China, Russia and Indonesia but currently excludes India.

APEC members account for 60 per cent of world energy demand and, in the US, China and Indonesia, its top three greenhouse-gas emitters.

Neither Australia nor the US has ratified the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which would commit them to binding targets for reducing emissions. China, Indonesia and India, though part of the Kyoto initiative, have not yet been set pollution-reduction targets.

'The Kyoto model - top-down, prescriptive, legalistic and Eurocentric - simply won't fly in a rising Asia-Pacific region,' Howard said.

He said that APEC leaders could 'support an emerging practical consensus on a global framework for tackling climate change that is more comprehensive, more multi-faceted and more flexible than the Kyoto-style approach.'

Howard said he had spoken to US President George W Bush, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper about an APEC initiative on climate change before the three leaders left for Germany to attend the G8 meeting.

He described what he had in mind as a 'bottom-up process in which links between national emissions-trading schemes are gradually expanded' and that outlined a 'shared objective' rather than set national targets.

Last week, Howard reversed his previous stance and promised that next year he would set a national target for cutting emissions and before 2012 introduce a carbon-trading system that would 'take account of global developments and preserve the competitiveness of our trade-exposed, emissions-intensive industries.'

Howard's 11-year-old coalition government trails the opposition Labor Party in the run up to a general election later this year. Labor has promised to sign Kyoto and, unlike the Howard government, has pledged not to resort to nuclear power as an antidote to climate change.

Greens leader Bob Brown said that the thrust of Howard's APEC initiative was a 'polluters' club' rather than a genuine bid to address climate change.

In December, top officials from Australia, Japan, the United States, China, Korea and India met in Sydney to discuss technologies that could slow climate change.

The first meeting of the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (AP6) wound up with pledges of hundreds of millions of dollars to develop low-emission technologies for industry, but no obligation or incentives for industries. Howard indicated that his APEC initiative would be along the lines of the loose AP6 dialogue.