Climate juggernaut on the horizon, U.N. talks told 2

POZNAN, Poland, Dec 1, 2008 (AFP) -- War, hunger, poverty and sickness will stalk humanity if the world fails to tackle climate change, a 12-day U.N. conference on global warming heard on Monday.

A volley of grim warnings sounded out at the start of the marathon talks, a step to a new worldwide treaty to reduce greenhouse gases and help countries exposed to the wrath of an altered climate.

"Humankind in its activity just reached the limits of the closed system of our planet Earth," said Polish Environment Minister Maciej Nowicki, elected to chair the December 1-12 meeting in the city of Poznan.

"Further expansion in the same style will generate global threats of really great intensity -- huge droughts and floods, cyclones with increasingly more destructive power, pandemics of tropical disease, dramatic decline of biodiversity, increasing ocean levels," said Nowicki.

"All these can cause social and even armed conflict and migration of people at an unprecedented scale."

The forum of the 192-member U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) comes halfway in a two-year process, launched in Bali, Indonesia, that aims at crafting a new pact in Copenhagen in December 2009.

Nowicki's warning was underscored by Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which provides neutral scientific opinion on global warming and its impacts.

"The impacts of climate change, if there is inaction, can be extremely serious," he said, delivering some sobering statistics to sharpen minds among the almost 11,000 conference participants in Poznan.

The number of people living in severely stressed river basins is projected to rise from 1.4 to 1.6 billion in 1995 to 4.3-6.9 billion in 2050, Pachauri said.

"That's almost the majority of humanity," he said. Between 20 and 30 percent of species assessed will be at increasingly high risk of extinction as global temperatures exceed two to three degrees centigrade (3.6-5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, he said. Progress under the so-called Bali Roadmap has been bogged down over demands for concessions and the sheer complexity of a deal.

Rich countries are historically to blame for most of today's warming. They are lobbying for emerging giant countries, led by China and India, which will be the big polluters of tomorrow, to do more to tackle their surging emissions.

Developing countries, meanwhile, want the West to help pay for them to expand their economies in a sustainable manner and to stump up cash to help vulnerable countries cope with climate change.

Hopes for a breakthrough at Poznan have also been darkened by the global economic crisis.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, prime minister of Denmark, which is tasked with steering the proposed treaty to a conclusion, urged countries not to be deterred and argued that investing in green technology created growth and jobs. "I feel confident that the financial crisis will be overcome. The recovery will come. However climate change is not going to become less of a problem in the coming years," he said.

Environmental pressure groups agreed, with Greenpeace saying that the global recession was "nothing compared to the trillions of dollars that climate change will cost us."

"The current finance crunch was the result of ignoring major risks, so let's not repeat this mistake by ignoring the even bigger risks from climate change," said the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).

Delegates in Poland will be examining an 82-page document containing a vast range of proposals for action beyond 2012, when emissions-curbing pledges under the Kyoto Protocol run out.

The hope is to condense this labyrinthine document into a workable blueprint for negotiations culminating in a deal in Copenhagen.

One spur for optimism is the election of Barack Obama as US president, who has vowed to sweep away George W. Bush's climate policies which caused the United States to be isolated in the world environmental arena since 2001. Obama has set a goal of reducing US emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and by 80 percent by 2050, using a cap-and-trade system and a 10-year programme worth 150 billion dollars in renewable energy.

Copyright 2008 -- Agence France-Presse

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