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Disagreement in Bali is threatening to scuttle future emission-reduction goals supported by New Zealand at the United Nations meeting.
New Zealand's delegation has backed a European-led push to include in the meeting's final text a goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 25 per cent to 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020.
But the range has been rejected by the United States, Canada and Australia, and uncertainty surrounds whether any targets at all will emerge in the text now being worked through in the final days of the meeting.
Around 190 nations have descended on Bali for the talks, which are intended to launch negotiations for an agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol when its first commitment phase ends in 2012.
The deadlock over whether to identify a target range for emission reductions so early in the negotiating process is hanging over the meeting, but New Zealand's Climate Change Minister David Parker was yesterday optimistic that a decent roadmap for future negotiations would come out of the conference.
"If we can conclude this, the roadmap will have listed the essential components of a post-2012 deal," Mr Parker said from Bali.
"It won't have particularisation of what each of those components looks like in detail, but there will be broad agreement that the post-2012 agreement has to tick off each of these areas in order for it to work and for it to be agreed by everyone."
The range of 25 per cent to 40 per cent cuts by 2020 originates from scientists' suggestions that such reductions were needed to avert the worst impacts of climate change.
Mr Parker said New Zealand agreed there needed to be an expression of willingness on the part of developed countries to say the climate change effort had to be guided by what scientists were telling them.
"And the scientists are telling us that for developed countries we've got to be looking at 25 per cent to 40 per cent below," he said.
At the most, Mr Parker said, a range would be in the conference's text, but "that's not set in concrete yet".
The United States has said that even a non-binding mention of a 25 per cent to 40 per cent range could prejudge the outcome of negotiations.
The opposition from the United States, Canada, Australia and others has angered developing nations, whose own emissions are rising rapidly.
But even United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has warned that it might be too ambitious to refer to specific emissions reductions this early in the negotiating process.
He told reporters that "somewhere down the road" targets would be necessary, but for now "it may be too ambitious".
New Zealand has attempted to take on a leadership role at the conference by putting forward a proposal to try to push ahead talks about deforestation.
Mr Parker said there were legitimate concerns from both developed and developing countries about how to handle the issue of deforestation of important forests, which were "the lungs of the planet".
New Zealand wanted to advance the issue and had suggested a way of dealing with it outside the Kyoto Protocol.
That move was praised by Green Party co-leader Russel Norman.
However, National Party climate change spokesman Nick Smith said it rang hollow when New Zealand's own deforestation was at an all-time high.
Mr Parker and the New Zealand team have also been thrust into the spotlight at the Bali conference by being chosen for a special job of helping with a review of the effectiveness of the Kyoto Protocol - a review required under the protocol itself.
- With agencies
