A senior Danish negotiator on climate change has urged relevant governments to deliver on their pledges to fight global warming under the nonbinding Copenhagen Accord, given that a post-Kyoto Protocol treaty still appears years away.
In an interview in Tokyo, Bo Lidegaard, permanent undersecretary of state at the prime minister's office, also cast doubt on the prospect of China and the United States — the world's two largest carbon dioxide emitters not obliged to reduce their carbon emissions — joining such a treaty any time soon due to their political constraints.
Lidegaard's remarks in Tokyo on Feb. 2 came at a time when hope has all but faded for a new binding pact at a U.N. climate conference in Durban, South Africa, later this year, with eyes now on the future of the Kyoto Protocol, under which the current reduction obligation period expires at the end of 2012.