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UN climate talks in Kenya next week will hunt for new ways to fight global warming, stung by a warning that long-term inaction may trigger a cataclysmic economic downturn.
But delegates say the 189-nation talks from November 6-17 look unlikely to make any big breakthroughs and may shy away from setting a firm timetable for working out a successor to the UN's Kyoto Protocol, the UN plan for curbing global warming which runs out in 2012.
The United Nations says progress is urgently needed, both on a global deal beyond 2012 and in working out how to help developing nations adapt to projected changes such as more droughts, floods and rising sea levels.
"The clock is ticking," said Achim Steiner, head of the Nairobi-based UN Environment Programme (UNEP). "We are in fact in some ways with our backs against the wall if you want to have a post-2012 regime in place. We need to keep moving."
"We need to act very urgently or it's going to get very expensive," said Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat in Bonn. Most scientists say fossil fuels burnt in power plants, factories and cars are the main cause of warming.
But de Boer said there was no pressure yet to set a deadline for completing a post-2012 pact, noting that a broad "dialogue" on future actions would only end in 2007. "I don't think there will be pressure in Nairobi to set the date," he told Reuters.
The meeting, of 6,000 delegates with ministers attending the second week, will try to work out how to involve Kyoto outsiders led by the United States, the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, and developing nations such as China and India more closely in longer-term UN-led plans.
Kyoto obliges 35 industrialised nations to cut emissions to 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. On Monday, the most comprehensive review of the economics of climate change warned that costs of inaction in fighting global warming could cause an economic downturn on a scale associated with world wars or the 1930s depression.
Environmentalists hope the apocalyptic warnings in the report by Britain's Nicholas Stern, a former World Bank chief economist, might inject more urgency into Nairobi. "The Stern review is a wake-up call for the world," said Martin Hiller of the WWF environmental group.
Environmentalists, some governments and many businesses planning long-term investments in new technologies want negotiators work out a successor to Kyoto by 2008.
"I think that to try to finalise a new climate regime by 2008 would be very ambitious indeed," de Boer said. He said he hoped instead that the world would agree in 2007 to "kick start" negotiations.
Some experts reckon that any broader successor to Kyoto may have to wait until 2010 - after US President George W. Bush steps down from the White House in January 2009. Bush, who says Kyoto would cost US jobs and wrongly excludes developing nations, is investing heavily in new technologies but his policies allow emissions to rise to 2012.
And the Stern report showed no sign of converting sceptics about capping greenhouse gas emissions. The White House Council on Environmental Quality called the report "another contribution" to an "abundance of economic analysis" on the issue of climate change.
And Opec Secretary-General Mohammed Barkindo said the report had "no foundations in either science or economics". The Nairobi talks will try to promote investments under a Kyoto project channelling aid to developing nations, ranging from wind farms in China to hydro-electric schemes in Brazil. African nations have lagged so far under the scheme.

Copyright Reuters, 2006

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