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Group Presses Poor Nations on CO 2

By James Kanter

Deforestation in the tropics, seen here in Kuala Cenaku, Indonesia, accounts for 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. When a prominent figure from the developing world delivers a sharp rebuke to China, India and Brazil for failing to take action on climate change, will those countries listen?

Major developing countries have insisted that they have the right to expand their economies – and emissions – so long as their emissions did not approach the much higher per-capita carbon dioxide emissions rates that are the norm for the world’s industrialized powers.

But Valli Moosa, a former environment minister in South Africa and the president of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, told a packed auditorium of delegates at the World Conservation Congress in Barcelona on Sunday evening that poorer nations could no longer maintain that their emissions of planet-warming gases were insignificant compared to industrialized nations. (The developing world’s carbon dioxide emissions now surpass those of industrialized countries, by one assessment.)

“It is not good enough for big developing countries to take absolutely no responsibility just because the biggest contributors to climate change are the developed countries,” Mr. Moosa said at the opening ceremony of the congress, held every four years under the auspices of the IUCN.

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