Merkel: Developing nations to have hard questions on climate change

Aug 31, 2007, 6:32 GMT

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.

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.

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.