3:45 pm
A European Union delegation has been unable to persuade the Australian Government to ratify the Kyoto International Treaty on climate change.
The Australian Environment Minister, Senator Robert Hill, said his government will not ratify the treaty as its rules have not been confirmed and it lacks the agreement of the United States.
He said Australia is waiting for the US, which is responsible for 25 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, to sign up before it makes a commitment.
The US pulled out of the treaty in March this year.
Australia has been sympathetic to President Bush's rejection of the Kyoto agreement on the grounds it was economically harmful to the United States and fatally flawed for not including developing nations like China.
The EU delegation, headed by Olivier Deleuze, Belgium's state secretary for Energy and Sustainable Development, had been lobbying the Australian government ratify the 1997 protocol on cutting greenhouse gas emissions ahead of the next round of climate change talks to be held in Bonn, Germany in just over a week.
The European Union's commissioner for the environment, Margot Wallstrom, said they mainly wanted to ensure that Australia was prepared to negotiate seriously at the next round of talks in Germany.
She said the European Union remains willing to ratify the treaty but acknowledges the different stance of other countries.
Ms Wallstrom was quoted in Melbourne newspaper
The Age
as saying she did no think waiting for the United States was a good strategy.
"And I think it is very much like waiting for someone who has declined an invitation ... We ought to instead try our best to get an agreement in Bonn to make it possible for the United States to come back to the process," she said.
But Senator Hill told
The Age
ratifying the deal could "lock (the US) out forever".
The protocol, signed in the Japanese city of Kyoto in 1997, committed developed nations to cutting emissions of carbon dioxide, the main so-called greenhouse gas, by an average of 5.2 per cent from 1990 levels by 2012.
The treaty has been in danger of disintegrating ever since the United States - the world's top carbon dioxide producer - withdrew.
Greenhouse gases are believed to contribute to rising global temperatures, which may cause sea levels to rise, wiping out low-lying islands, and lead to more dangerous weather conditions, water shortages, epidemics and social strife.
Australia, the world's largest coal exporter, won the right to increase its emissions by eight per cent above 1990 levels.
But Prime Minister John Howard's government has said it believed the Kyoto agreement was dead without US support and has backed Bush's assertion that the fight against climate change needed to include developing nations.
The future of the Kyoto agreement now lies largely in the hands of Japan, where the EU delegation will travel on July 9.
Tokyo has not committed itself to pushing on with Kyoto and instead is trying to woo the United States back into the fold.
For the pact to take effect, it needs to be ratified by at least 55 countries whose collective emissions of carbon dioxide account for 55 per cent of the developed world's 1990 emissions.
The EU, which is determined to push ahead with ratification of Kyoto, accounts for 36.1 per cent of the emissions.
The US stance angered global environmentalists, and Australia has also come under stern criticism from local groups.
Scientists say Australia is one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change, and many South Pacific atolls in its immediate neighbourhood could sink beneath the waves.
- REUTERS, HERALD ONLINE STAFF
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
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United Nations Environment Program