UN's Ban urged to lead global climate change plans

UNITED NATIONS Jan 17 (Reuters) A UN official said on Tuesday he urged UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to take a leading role in helping world governments battle global warming after 2014, when the Kyoto treaty on climate change expires.

Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Climate Secretariat (UNFCCC) in Bonn, Germany, said he told Ban during a meeting on Monday at UN headquarters that he should organize a meeting of heads of government to chart the next global steps against warming.

''He indicated that he was aware of this idea and said that he would be exploring in his meetings how to take the process forward,'' de Boer told reporters.

Asked who should lead the process, de Boer said he thought Ban was in ''an excellent position'' to do so.

However, ''I think the secretary-general has to make the assessment whether he would have enough backing to fulfill that kind of a role,'' he added.

The last annual UN meeting of about 100 environment ministers in Nairobi in November made little progress on finding ways to broaden the Kyoto protocol after it runs out.

The Kyoto accord obliges 35 developed nations to cut their emissions of greenhouse gases by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-2012.

But Kyoto nations account for only about one-third of global greenhouse emissions.

Big developing nations such as China, India, South Africa and Brazil are excluded from the pact and the United States, the world's biggest source of greenhouses gases, pulled out of the pact in 2001.

The challenge for the post-Kyoto era is to entice these nonparticipants to join in the process in order to make it more effective, and de Boer said he was convinced this was possible with the right negotiating framework.

De Boer said Ban emphasised during their meeting that the consequences of warming were going to be very serious and that the cost of action now would be much lower than the cost of inaction later.

Ban also told de Boer he would try to raise the issue in his various meetings with world leaders.

REUTERS PKS BST0558