Finance chiefs end first climate forum but with few commitments

Agence France-Presse: Finance ministers and officials wrapped up a maiden forum on climate change Tuesday with a pledge to step up efforts to fight global warming, but few concrete commitments emerged. Financial representatives from 36 countries issued a statement recognising the severity of global warming and promising to make it a priority.

The statement followed first-of-a-kind talks held alongside the world climate conference to help reduce greenhouse gases. The UN's climate chief had earlier called on them to provide monetary muscle to tackle the global-warming crisis.

"This was a historic platform for finance and development ministers to engage more deeply in the ongoing process to tackle this most serious globally-shared problem," said Indonesia's finance minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati at the meeting in Bali, Indonesia. "Participants agreed that it is important for ministers of finance to take a more active role and integrate climate change issues into development planning and economic policies," she added.

Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which is organising the December 3-14 talks, earlier called on finance ministers to cement climate change into their policymaking. "Designing a long-term solution to climate change is mainly a challenge of intelligent financial engineering," he said. "It is the environment ministers who set the goals in this process, but it's the finance and economics ministers who have to get us to those goals," de Boer told AFP before addressing the finance chiefs.

The two-day talks began on Monday and were preceded by a weekend meeting of trade ministers. It is the first time ministers from these arenas have attended the annual UNFCCC meeting. Angel Gurria, secretary general of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), said the question of who should pay for battling climate change -- and take the lead in tackling it -- was a key topic. "There was a big discussion about the need to move towards a set of negotiations, which will include everybody, where all the countries can commit to doing their bit," he told AFP.

The meeting closed with a pledge to meet again on the sidelines of the next UNFCCC climate summit in Poznan, Poland, in December 2008. Environment ministers will meet in Bali for three days from Wednesday to close the UNFCCC talks, which aim to set a "roadmap" for action beyond 2012, when the current pledges of the Kyoto Protocol run out…