The need to act to adapt to climate disasters was one of the arguments used yesterday by Richard Kinley, the top UN climate official, at the opening of the Montreal climate change conference. In an allusion to the cyclones that have recently devastated the southeastern coast of the United States and other natural disasters, Kinley said that “the tragic tests suffered by many countries over the past year once again highlight the world’s vulnerability to climate-related disasters and the urgent need to adapt.”

The opening of the first conference of the signatory countries of the Kyoto Protocol – which is being held in parallel to the eleventh meeting of the Climate Change Convention – served the UN to call on industrialized countries to increase their efforts to reduce greenhouse gases that warm the atmosphere and distort the climate. Stephane Dion, Canada’s environment minister, insisted in his presentation that stabilizing the climate “now requires more action,” he told an audience of more than 10,000 representatives of governments, environmental groups and businesses.

The key conversions at this meeting will revolve around new commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, once the time horizon now set expires in 2012. The Kyoto protocol obliges 40 developed nations to cut their gases by 5.2% in 2012 compared to 1990. The big problem is that the US and Australia have withdrawn from this process by claiming that such restrictions were a straitjacket for their industrial fabric – a large consumer of cheap energy based on fossil fuels – while developing nations do not have to comply with this requirement as their per capita emission level is estimated to be lower. Without the U.S., the goal of stabilizing the climate is very complicated. After a slight reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in developed nations in the early 1990s, these are increasing. Thus, Japan and Canada, which were assigned a 6% reduction in Kyoto, have seen an increase of 24.2% and 12.8%, respectively (from 1990 to 2003).