greenhouse gas amissions

Australia criticised tor greenhouse gas amissions

Australia has been criticised for its lack of action in reducing greenhouse emissions and refusal to back emission targets.

David Adeang, the delegation

head of the tiny central Pacific republic of Naum, bluntly criticised Australia for not backing greenhouse gas emission targets that the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) has unanimously endorsed.

Adeang, an advisor to Naum’s president, said Australia should do more to reduce emissions.

Adeang was speaking outside an inter national climate change meeting hosted in the Marshalls by AOSIS, which included every Pacific island nation.

Other island officials said efforts by Australia and New Zealand to have forestry and land use issues included in the clean development programme were just to “off load all their reduction requirements onto planting trees” instead of having to reduce pollutiomlnside the meeting, island officials called on all western nations to take more

aggressive action to reverse climate change.

Tuiloma Neroni Slade, Samoa’s ambas sador to the United Nations and chair of AOSIS, said AOSIS must continue to per suade industrialised nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

But, Slade said, it was also critical to engage large developing countries such as China, Brazil and India that were also increasing emissions.

Philippines foreign ministry official Bemarditas Castro-Muller called the com mitment to reduce emissions on the part of the industrialised world “inadequate”.

Castro-Muller said the “primary respon sibility for greenhouse gas emissions is in the hands of industrialised nations who have achieved their development since the industrial revolution without con cern for the environment.

“We must find a way to get the industrialised nations to modify their long-term emissions that are

growing.”

Phillip Weech, the chair of the Bahamas national climate change

committee, said developed nations “must recognise that emissions are growing and their standard of living is rising at the expense of the environ ment.”

Castro-Muller said most of the pre dictions about sea level rise and other climate changes were for 50 to 100 years in the future but “the adverse effects are being felt now.”

“All developing countries are experi encing climate change,” she said.

Marshall Islands president Imata Kabua talked of the increased frequency of storm surges which have caused ocean waves on occasion to flood into the islands of the Marshalls, most of which are barely a metre above sea level. It is a growing problem for the small islands.(AFP) ■