Kyoto states to discuss post-2012 cuts

BONN, Germany, May 26 (Reuters) Countries signed up to the Kyoto Protocol reaffirmed plans today to set new targets for greenhouse gas emissions cuts after 2012, despite a growing band of Kyoto sceptics.

The conference of some 160 countries in Bonn set no timetable for agreeing on the goals, which would only apply to rich nations, but the talks would take at least two years.

The world's biggest polluter, the United States, was absent, having pulled out of Kyoto in 2001.

''The outcome of this will be a new set of quantitative caps,'' Michael Zammit Cutajar, head of the UN group driving the process, told Reuters at the end of May 15-26 talks. ''This is a new phase in the life of the Protocol.'' It was the first meeting of a group which Kyoto countries set up in Montreal in December 2005 to work out a roadmap for emissions cuts beyond 2012. Kyoto obliges 35 rich nations to cut emissions by at least 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12.

Burning fossil fuels powers the world's energy needs but also pumps out greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide which are largely blamed for global warming by nearly 1 degree centigrade in the past century.

Scientists say catastrophic climate change could follow without emission cuts, but many countries fear the economic impacts of these.

Canada recently said its present targets were unachievable, while the commitment of Japan, another Kyoto ratifier, could not be taken for granted, Cutajar said. He headed the UN's climate change body when it brokered the original Protocol in 1997.

''It's very important Canada stays on board. If Canada goes that starts to weaken the edifice,'' Cutajar said.

''The most important thing at the moment is to hold Japan in. I think they are committed ... but they are cautious at the moment about how they're in. They're extremely concerned about not going (too) far ahead in this game.'' The United States and Australia are the main industrial nations outside Kyoto. President George W. Bush said Kyoto would cost US jobs and wrongly excluded developing nations.

RIGOROUS The Kyoto Protocol limits the greenhouse gas emissions of rich nations, but allows these to buy emission cuts from other countries, and so establishes a carbon market.

Uncertainty about the future carbon price, given the 2012 Kyoto shelf-life, has had industry fretting over future energy costs, and power generators unsure what type of power plants to build.

The new impetus would reassure industry, Cutajar said.

''That action is now underway to determine targets ... is the beginning of a signal to carbon markets that they have a life ahead of them beyond 2012.'' ''After two weeks of negotiations, the brakes are off and the process is moving forward,'' said Jennifer Morgan, climate change director for the WWF environmental group.

''We haven't saved the planet here in Bonn,'' said Bill Hare of Greenpeace. ''But we have taken a step forward.'' Both Greenpeace and the WWF said far deeper cuts were needed.

The text of today's agreement stated that the post-2012 view would have a economic and scientific underpinning.

Cutajar said that underpinning would come from Britain's Stern Review on the economics of climate change and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) 2007 review of the science of global warming.

Reuters SHR GC1534