Kyoto on the line as South Africa prepares for UN climate talks

South African ministers hosting UN climate talks in December said the meeting must focus on keeping alive the Kyoto Protocol, the only binding global deal to cut greenhouse gases.

“We don’t want South Africa to be the death of the Kyoto Protocol,” said Environment Minister Edna Molewa. “We would like to have some mechanism agreed upon which will ensure that we retain the architecture,” she said.

South Africa’s foreign minister, meanwhile, said her country was on track in preparing for the high-level meeting of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. “South Africa is very much on schedule, if not ahead of schedule,” said Foreign Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, in charge of organising the November 28-December 9 talks in the eastern port city of Durban.

Kyoto is the only international agreement with binding targets for curbing carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

But its future is uncertain because China and the US, the world’s biggest two polluters, are not subject to its constraints. A first five-year commitment period covering 37 industrialised countries expires at the end of 2012. Japan, Canada and Russia have said they will not sign up for a new round of carbon-cutting vows. The EU says it will only do so if other nations – including emerging giants such as China and India, which do not have binding targets and have thus far refused to take them on – beef up efforts in a parallel negotiating arena.

South Africa has been criticised for dragging its feet before the complex talks, widely seen as a last-ditch chance to renew the emissions reductions targets agreed to in Kyoto in 1997.