APEC leaders tip watered-down climate pact

Asia-Pacific leaders said today that talks on a binding international pact to combat the potential disaster of climate change would drag on past a crunch meeting in Copenhagen next month.
    
Instead they backed a face-saving proposal from Danish prime minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen -- who jetted in for hastily arranged talks in Singapore -- which would produce a political statement of intent at the December meeting.
    
Complex negotiations towards an international and legally enforceable successor to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, which expires in 2012, would then continue.
    
At the talks attended by leaders including US president Barack Obama and China's Hu Jintao on the sidelines of an Asia-Pacific summit, there was broad consensus this was the best option for the troubled negotiations, officials said.
    
"There was an assessment by the leaders that it was unrealistic to expect a full, internationally legally-binding agreement to be negotiated between now and when Copenhagen starts in 22 days," US deputy national security adviser Mike Froman told reporters.
    
Froman said Rasmussen told the meeting "he would seek to achieve a politically binding agreement that covered all the major elements of the negotiations" during the conference in his capital.
    
In a final declaration, APEC called for "an ambitious outcome in Copenhagen" but dropped a proposal included in earlier summit drafts to slash their greenhouse gas emissions to half their 1990 levels by 2050.