The UN's top official on climate change on Friday called on wealthy countries to emulate the European Union (EU) and Japan by offering to slash their carbon emissions at a conference to be hosted by the US next month.
Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), said the talks for long-term emissions reductions in Washington on September 27-28, announced by the White House earlier, offered an exceptional chance to break the deadlock for tackling greenhouse gases.
"I view it with a lot of hope and expectation. This is the next step in the process and I am very keen to see where it takes us," de Boer said in an interview from Bonn with AFP.
"I would like to see a serious commitment from industrialised countries that they will go much further (in offering to cut greenhouse-gas pollution) than what they have already proposed."
De Boer singled out as a model the EU, which has committed itself to cutting its own emissions by 20 percent by 2020 and promised to deepen this to 30 percent if other big polluters follow suit, and Japan which wants the world to halve emissions by 2050.
The Washington conference, gathering major emitters in the rich and developing world as well as representatives from other big emerging economies, will be hosted by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and be addressed by President George W. Bush.
The goal is to agree on "a detailed contribution for a new global framework by the end of 2008" and this in turn would feed into a global deal under the UNFCCC, Bush said in his invitation, announced on Friday.
Under Bush, the United States has refused to ratify the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which requires rich countries to curb greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.
The absence of the world's No 1 polluter has nearly crippled the treaty, and its future beyond 2012, when its present commitment period runs out, is also uncertain. Negotiations on the post-2012 treaty take place in Bali, Indonesia, in December under the UNFCCC, which is Kyoto's parent.
The process has been dogged by two problems how far big developing countries, such as China, India and Brazil, will pledge to tackle their own pollution, and the unwillingness of the United States to embrace the Kyoto principle of mandatory cuts. Bush unveiled his initiative ahead of the Group of Eight (G8) summit in Heiligendamm, Germany, in June.
His scheme stirred anxieties among Kyoto's European champions that he sought to subvert the UNFCCC and exclude poor countries by limiting the deal to rich countries.
De Boer said he did not feel any concern on that score, as the G8 summit made clear that the multilateral process was paramount. "I would describe President Bush as taking climate change by the horns, but I want to see where he and the bull go," he admitted, however.
Bush has always opposed the Kyoto Protocol, arguing its binding caps on emissions would be too costly for the oil-dependent US economy. He also said it was unfair, as its present format only requires industrial countries, and not fast-growing emerging economies such as China and India, to make such pledges.
These countries reply that they will tackle their pollution as much as they can, provided it does not hurt their rise out of poverty and rich countries, which are historically to blame for global warming, shoulder the main burden.