At 'Hagen we agreed to live to fight another day: Saran

New Delhi, Dec 26 (PTI) India has said that the
Copenhagen Accord endorses the view that the rich nations have
the responsibility to agree to emission reduction cuts but
conceded that it also opens a window for the burial of the
Kyoto Protocol in the future.

However, it said that future of the Kyoto Protocol, which
commits industrialised nations to undertake legally binding
emission cuts, depends on the way the post-Copenhagen
negotiations are carried out.
"That it opens a window and that possibility is there, of
course. But that depends on how we take the negotiations
forward," the Indian Prime Minister's Special Envoy on Climate
Change Shyam Saran told Karan Thapar on Devil's Advocate
Programme on CNN-IBN.
He was replying to a question on whether the Copenhagen
Accord opened a window for a new treaty that would allow the
burial of the Kyoto Protocol.
"What I am trying to point out is that in a sense we have
agreed that we will live to fight another day," he said adding
that the Copenhagen Accord was "beyond a step forward" in the
efforts to tackle climate change.
Saran said that a major achievement of the Copenhagen
talks was that the parties had agreed that the negotiations
would continue on the twin tracks of the Bali Action Plan and
the Kyoto Protocol.

"We have also at the same time agreed to carry on the
negotiations on the basis of Bali Action Plan. It (the
negotiations) is not settled yet. The important achievement of
developing countries is that they did not allow this saga to
end (at Copenhagen)," Saran said.
The Accord was "taken note of" by the 15th Conference of
Parties at their extended meeting in the Danish capital on
December 19.
"I would say it (Accord) is beyond a step forward because
here you have an Accord which touched upon all the major
outstanding issues...and in a sense represented a very broad
consensus of the global community," Saran said.
The Kyoto Protocol cannot be forgotten or buried "for the
simple reason that it is a valid legal instrument," he said of
the 1997 pact that mandates the rich nations to take up
legally binding emissions while exempting the developed
nations from doing so.
Saran said at the moment all the nations have agreed that
Kyoto Protocol must remain and "we should continue the talks
on that track".
"The battle (between developed and developing nations on
emission cuts) is not settled yet. The Accord has not exempted
the developed countries from legally binding emission cuts and
even from historical responsibility.
"What Copenhagen has done is to endorse the view that the
developed nations have a responsibility to engage in absolute
emission reduction while the major developing countries have
the responsibility of mitigating the rise in their emission,"
he added. PTI AJ
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