Pacific island Tuvalu's bid for tough climate action blocked

The tiny Pacific island of Tuvalu led a group of vulnerable countries in walking out of the climate change negotiations here today after its proposal for tough, legally binding measures to control global warming was blocked.

Tuvalu and other low-lying small island nations will be the first victims of the rising sea level. It proposed amending the UN climate treaty to require countries to keep the rise in global temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Danish president of the conference Connie Hedegaard declined to advance the proposal after objections from some other countries, including oil producers, which will be hurt by the proposed strict limits on using fossil fuels.

India and China also opposed Tuvalu's call, saying the COP 15 should stick to the Bali Action Plan and the protocol to battle climate change.

Both India and China strongly opposed any movement away from the protocol on the grounds that it would detract from the current discussions and that opening a third track of negotiation would further dilute the process.

"By asking us to discuss new proposals for a protocol you are actually asking us to express a no-confidence in the Kyoto protocol," said Vijai Sharma, India's environment secretary.

"We should not and cannot sidestep our own legitimate processes and create more hurdles for ourselves," he said.

"The proposals for a new protocol at this stage while we are still engaged in negotiations for an agreed outcome under Bali are therefore premature," Sharma said.

Sharma was joined by China's lead negotiator, Su Wei, who said, "The main task of this [conference] is to adapt an agreed outcome from the Bali Action Plan and we should very much focus on that.

"We have a very valid system to combat climate change."

Tuvalu delegate Ian Fry said his country could accept nothing less than a full discussion of its proposal for a new legal protocol, which was submitted to the UN climate convention six months ago.

"My prime minister and many other heads of state have the clear intention of coming to Copenhagen to sign on to a legally binding deal," Fry said. "Tuvalu is one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change, and our future rests on the outcome of this meeting."

The call was backed by other members of the Association of Small Island States (Aosis), including the Cook Islands, Barbados, and Fiji, and by some African countries, including Sierra Leone, Senegal, and Cape Verde.

"Our future rests on the outcome of this meeting," Fry said. The Tuvalu negotiator called for a suspension of the entire COP proceedings until the matter on a new protocol was
resolved. Eventually, Hedegaard set aside the proposal.

Besides China and India, the proposal was opposed by oil-producing nations like Saudi Arabia, which said it could not accept the strict limits on burning fossil fuels.

This disagreement also indicates a wider split that is emerging between the richer developing countries like China, India, and South Africa, and the poor African states and Aosis.

This split is also reflected in the divergences in the draft of a potential treaty framed by the BASIC (Brazil, India, South Africa and China) countries on which the Aosis countries said their particular vulnerabilities had not been addressed.

The Indian delegation here pointed out that India with "hundreds of islands, a vast coastline, Himalayan glaciers" is amongst the "the most vulnerable countries to climate change".

"No country has so many different vulnerabilities," an Indian delegate said. "That is why we are concerned with the prospects of survival of the Kyoto protocol and obligations of parties."

In the next eight days, negotiators from 192 countries gathered here for the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference are expected to hammer out a legally binding Climate change treaty for which negotiations have been on for two years.

The overall climate negotiations are moving on two tracks. The first is under the Bali Action Plan that requires parties to produce a legally binding treaty before the first commitment period of the Kyoto protocol ends in 2012.

The second track is the extension of the Kyoto protocol for a second commitment period, the only treaty under which industrialised nations have signed on to legally binding carbon-emission cuts.