Huhne demands ‘serious talking’ at key climate change summit

In the run-up to the annual talks, experts have warned that levels of the greenhouse gases that drive climate change have reached a record high, and that global warming is likely to result in more extremes of weather including heatwaves and storms.

Last week the UN Environmental Programme released a report showing the gap between what countries have voluntarily pledged to do to cut emissions and what needs to be done to keep global temperature rises below 2C and avoid “dangerous” climate change is even wider than thought.

UK Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne said: “Preventing floods, droughts and freak weather patterns for future generations requires the world’s governments to get down to serious talking in Durban over the next two weeks.

“We need to send out the strongest possible signal on our commitment to limit global temperature change.

“This needs to resonate from the negotiating room in Durban to boardrooms around the world where investors are making decisions now about how to power our economies for decades to come.”

But while the European Union, which negotiates as a bloc at the talks, wants a comprehensive, binding treaty on climate change to cover all major economies, some of those countries do not want to even begin negotiating a new deal.

Developing countries say their red line is the Kyoto Protocol, the existing climate treaty whose first term expires at the end of 2012, which they do not want to see jettisoned in favour of a new deal which they fear would be weaker.

Asad Rehman of Friends of the Earth said: “The Kyoto Protocol is the only legally binding agreement on climate,” adding that the most vulnerable countries such as those in Africa and small island states are worried that it would take five or even 10 years to reach a new legally binding agreement.

In that time, the impacts of delaying action to cut emissions would be “catastrophic” for those countries.

However Kyoto was never ratified by the United States and does not cover major emitters such as China whose emissions per head now outstrip France and Spain, while signatories including Canada and Russia, both of who have huge fossil fuel reserves, have refused point blank to sign up to a second period of the treaty.

Mr Huhne said the EU wants a mandate agreed at Durban to negotiate a new deal by 2015, reducing emissions by 2020.