Nations meet on climate change

THE UN’s top climate official said yesterday she expects governments to make a long-delayed decision on whether industrial countries should make further commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Amid fresh warnings of climate-related disasters in the future, delegates from about 190 countries were gathering in Durban, South Africa, for a two-week conference beginning today. They hope to break deadlocks on how to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants.

Christiana Figueres, head of the UN climate secretariat, said the stakes for the negotiations are high, underscored by new scientific studies.

Under discussion was “nothing short of the most compelling energy, industrial, behavioural revolution that humanity has ever seen”, she said.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a hero of the movement that ended apartheid in South Africa, led a rally at a rugby stadium later yesterday urging negotiators to be more ambitious during what were expected to be difficult talks.

In the weeks preceding the conference delegates have been bombarded by research and reports predicting grim consequences for failing to act.

The UN weather agency reported last week that greenhouse gases have now reached record levels of concentrations in the atmosphere since the start of the industrial era in 1750.

The Nobel prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that “unprecedented extreme weather” caused by global warming will become increasingly frequent and make some places unliveable.