http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/world/asia/03bali.html?ref=worldBy PETER GELLING and ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: December 3, 2007
JAKARTA, Indonesia, Dec. 2 — Thousands of government officials, industry lobbyists, environmental campaigners and observers are arriving on the Indonesian island of Bali for two weeks of talks starting Monday that are aimed at breathing new life into the troubled 15-year-old global climate treaty.
A heightened sense of urgency surrounds the meeting in light of a report issued last month by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which detailed the potentially devastating effects of global warming in the panel’s strongest language yet.
But few participants expect this round of talks to produce significant breakthroughs. At most, they say, it will result in new commitments to negotiate to update the original treaty by the end of 2009.
“The bulk of attention will be on the future,” said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the organization administering the treaty. “My hope is that we can formally launch negotiations and form an agenda for those negotiations that will lead to a long-term policy response to climate change.”
The original treaty, signed by almost all nations in 1992, set voluntary goals for curbing the emission of greenhouse gases, which mostly come from burning fossil fuels and forests, and which have been linked by scientists to global warming. But few of those goals have been met.
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