Presenting the UK government's action plan on international climate negotiations, Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband said the UK is willing to sign a new Kyoto Treaty in a unilateral move to breathe life into the UN negotiations, which have been marred with squabbles over the legal form of any final text.
"We are determined to unblock the negotiations. We are willing to offer a second agreement under Kyoto, provided there is a separate legal treaty covering all other countries," Miliband is quoted by the Guardian newspaper as saying.
The UK move represents a departure from the official EU line, which has been to negotiate a new treaty that builds on the Kyoto architecture. London still prefers a single treaty that is binding to all parties, but it is prepared to consider a second Kyoto commitment period in the spirit of moving towards a legally-binding agreement, the government states.
The diplomatic manoeuvre is an attempt to hammer out an agreement with developing countries on a legally-binding treaty that obliges them to take action on domestic emission cuts while maintaining the Kyoto Protocol. Developing nations have repeatedly demanded to a second round of concrete emission reduction targets for industrialised countries.
The new treaty would also include the US, which has not ratified Kyoto and has refrained from entering into debates on its continuation.
"We are asking that developing countries internationalise, in a legally-binding agreement, the mitigation actions they take domestically," the document reads. They would, however, not be required to commit to specific emission reductions, nor would they be subjected to "any punitive compliance measures".
The announcement came as UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown was hosting the first meeting of a High Level Advisory Group on Climate Finance, set up by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in February.
The Downing Street meeting, featuring key experts like US President Barack Obama's chief economic adviser Larry Summers, economist Lord Nicolas Stern and other heads of government and finance ministers, discussed ways to deliver €30 billion in immediate fast-start funding between 2010 and 2012 and the annual €100 billion by 2020 pledged by industrialised countries in Copenhagen last December.
Miliband stressed the importance of releasing as much of the fast-start funding as possible before the Cancún climate conference at the end of the year. The government called on other countries to release funds swiftly, adding that the EU and other developed countries are working to ensure that progress on delivery is made "clearly and openly".
