A SIGNIFICANT step forward was taken here yesterday to deal with global warming when the international community committed itself to negotiating "legally binding" objectives aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
With Australia, which has huge coal reserves, as well as Russia and other oil producing countries dissenting, the second Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention one Climate Change agreed to accept a strong ministerial declaration on the issue.
If confirmed by a follow up conference in Kyoto, Japan, scheduled for the end of next year, this would oblige the industrialised countries to implement significant overall reductions "in greenhouse gas emissions within specified timeframes".
Importantly, the Geneva declaration endorsed the most recent scientific assessment by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as the "most comprehensive and authoritative" picture of what would happen to the planet if nothing was done.
In a move bitterly resisted by the fossil fuel lobby, ministers said they accepted that the continued rise of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere would lead to "dangerous" and even "irreversible" changes in climate.
Before flying back to Dublin, the Minister for the Environment, Mr Howlin, (who represented the European Union in negotiating the text) said it represented a "tremendous advance" on the first climate change conference in Berlin last year.
Mr Howlin said the "strong text" of the ministerial declaration, crucially supported by the US, augured well for the conclusion of a protocol in Kyoto.
The two page draft declaration had been cobbled together at 1.30 a.m. yesterday after six hours of tough negotiations involving a widely based team of ministers and, following a tense morning, was presented to the full conference as a virtual fait accompli.
The afternoon plenary session was delayed for 30 minutes as an increasingly large and argumentative serum of delegates gathered around the podium in the main assembly hall to haggle over the details.
In the middle was Ms Eileen Claussen, President Clinton's assistant secretary of state for international environmental affairs who later told delegates that the US "wholeheartedly" endorsed the ministerial declaration.
Amid widespread and sustained applause, which isolated the oil producing countries, the conference president, Mr Chen Chimutengwende of Zimbabwe declared that it had been agreed to accept the text of the declaration.
He then allowed some countries which had "difficulties" with it to speak, among them Australia, which has been accused by the green lobby here of "putting more value on its current coal exports to Japan than it does on future generations of Australians".
But the strongest reservations were expressed by Saudi Arabia, speaking on its own behalf, and also for Venezuela, Iran, Kuwait, Quatar, Russia, Nigeria, Oman, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates all oil producers - as well as Jordan, Sudan and Yemen.
