While the latest round of UN climate change talks is going on here in Spain on Nov. 2-6, Yve de Boer, the UN climate chief, said on Tuesday that the Kyoto Protocol needed to continue and industrialized countries should come up with more ambitious targets on emission reduction under the protocol.
"Until the moment the Kyoto Protocol is the only thing we have," De Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change, said in an exclusive interview with Xinhua.
"There is a saying in my language that if you only have one pair of shoes, don't throw them away before you have new ones," said De Boer, "so at
the moment Kyoto is my shoes and I would like to keep them on until I know there are something better for me to have. "
He said industrialized countries had to do more to fight climate change and come with more ambitious targets according to the Kyoto Protocol.
De Boer said the international scientific community through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that to avoid the worst
impact of climate change, industrialized countries needed to reduce their emissions by between 25 percent and 40 percent by 2020.
"And the targets on the table now are not yet in that range. So we need to raise the level of ambition of industrialized countries," he said.
And, this is one of the two biggest problems facing negotiators at the UN climate change talks and the other is climate finance, he added.
"I think, first of all, that we are not yet seeing emission targets from industrialized countries that are ambitious enough. Secondly, we do not announce on the question of finance, how significant finance is going to be mobilized." he said.
In the view of the UN climate chief, these two biggest problems are very closely interrelated and need guidance from world leaders in order to
get a solution.
"Negotiators here are talking about financial requirements of hundreds of millions of dollars per year. And those are the kinds of decisions you
really need heads of state or government to take," De Boer said.
Despite the two biggest problems, there is also some progress made until now at the Barcelona meeting, according to the UN climate chief.
"I think there is a clear consensus that we need to establish a new body that is going to look specifically to technology transfer and cooperation," he said.
There is also a growing consensus on strengthening support to developing countries on adaptation and a growing agreement that stronger
capacity building is needed in developing countries, he added.
Talking of his expectations for Copenhagen, De Boer said "We can have a decision in Copenhagen which makes it absolutely clear how a long term
strategy to address climate change is going to be shaped, and how such a strategy can later be written into a legally binding treaty."
He said the Copenhagen conference could make it clear by how much individual rich countries would reduce their emissions and how much money
was going to be generated to help developing countries on adaptation and mitigation, and what developing countries would do to limit growth of their emissions.
Commenting on China's efforts in fighting climate change, the UN official said: "I think China's efforts actually are very impressive."
He said that China began to talk about green economy in its five-year plans and started to make the economy more efficient a number of years ago.
The ongoing Barcelona negotiations are the last round of talks on climate change before the Copenhagen conference in December.
The Copenhagen conference is scheduled to set the mid-term emission reduction targets for developed countries under Kyoto Protocol, and make
substantial arrangements for the implementation of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.