Following are the main points from Saturday's agreement at the 13-day climate conference in Bali, staged by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
BALI ROADMAP
-- A preamble notes the "urgency" of scientific evidence that warming of the climate system is unequivocal and that delay in reducing emissions increases the risk that the impacts of climate change will worsen.
-- The Roadmap sets the framework for negotiations for a long-term agreement on emissions cuts, including the United States, the only industrial power to remain outside the UN's Kyoto Protocol.
-- The negotiations are to wrap up in Copenhagen at the end of 2009, to give parties time to ratify the treaty so that it takes effect at the end of 2012, following on from current commitments under Kyoto. Four meetings are scheduled in 2008: in March/April, June, August/September and finally in December, in Poznan, Poland.
-- The Roadmap does not specify any clear emissions goal, nor does it suggest which countries should make emissions cuts or how deep these cuts should be. But in a footnote in the preamble, it refers to scenarios by the UN's Nobel-winning scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which include a goal of halving global emissions by 2050, compared with the level for 2000. Rich countries would have to cut their emissions by 25-40 percent by 2020.
-- Developing countries will be urged to meet "measurable, reportable and verifiable" actions for tackling their emissions, supported by cleaner technology, financing and skills-building.
-- The Roadmap includes possible financial support to halt deforestation and forest degradation, which account for roughly a fifth of global greenhouse-gas emissions today.
OTHER DECISIONS
-- The conference agreed on the mechanism for governing and administering the Adaptation Fund, set up under the Kyoto Protocol to help poor countries cope with climate change. The Fund will be sourced by a levy of two percent on projects under Kyoto's carbon-market innovation, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).
-- The conference took steps for setting up mechanisms to encourage the transfer of cleaner technology to countries to help them reduce or avoid carbon pollution.
-- Carbon capture and sequestration (CSS), a prototype method of piping off carbon dioxide (CO2) from fossil-fuel-burning power plants and pumping it into geological storage chambers underground, also gets a small boost. The conference asked its scientific and technical body to report back to Poznan on the possibility of integrating CCS schemes in the CDM after 2012.
